Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
