Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to 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 destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 then-recent misadventures 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 attracted to 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 platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes 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 reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to 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 left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control 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 triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread 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 eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
