Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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 distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, 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 earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
