Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged 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 routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless 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 Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
