Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures 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 artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
