🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

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 rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.