Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale 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 the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – 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 president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control 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 triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
