Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
