Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles 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 prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate 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 new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
