🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter 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 after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned 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 strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.