Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures 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.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards 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 vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to 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 tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
