🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent example 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 guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping 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 tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy 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 considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.