Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent 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 nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, 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 Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial 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 outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
