Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify 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 honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch 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 brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
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 considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. 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 late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
