Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing 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, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
