Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, 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, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements 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 story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose 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 filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
