Bestowed upon a select group, 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 ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. 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 messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation 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. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned 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 ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned 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 idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: 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 head once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
