Bestowed upon an elite few, the title 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 distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring 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: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
