Bestowed upon a select group, 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 ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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 gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing 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 addressed 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned 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 atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
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 unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, 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 multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest 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 appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
