Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, 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 intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, 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 brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, 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 potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
