Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote 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 concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly 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 destroyed utterly.
