Bestowed upon a select group, 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 lens, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
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 Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – 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 registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
