Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on 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 destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – 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 commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
