🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled 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, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, 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 time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory 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 service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content 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 opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat 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 first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.