Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
