Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film 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 most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films 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 talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected 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, conscientious to the core 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 time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
