Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
