Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment 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 not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: 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 underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for 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 made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – 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, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
