Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example 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 honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
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 broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator 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 forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 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 Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
