🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: 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 debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.