Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example 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 indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama 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 more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written 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 enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near 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 reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: 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 debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. 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 recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
