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 distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to 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 homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
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 thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
