Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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 distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films 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 fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left 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 commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
