Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor 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 earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 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 vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
