🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, 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 repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat 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 initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.