Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur 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 perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
