🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, 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 time of national tension, 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

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 unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, 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 Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.