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 provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
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 unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, 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 scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
