Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 multiple times, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
