Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example 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 measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money 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 current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
