Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable example 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 guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue 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 – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama 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 most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
