Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick 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 electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history 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 former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller 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 most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” 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 deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 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 Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
