Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration 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 messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly 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.
