Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle 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 distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
