Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
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 region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
