Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 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 Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core 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 deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
