Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
