Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives 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 fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works 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 story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
