Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
To determine 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: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards 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 streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
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