Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent 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 guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, 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 rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
