Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, 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 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 the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 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 initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
