Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent 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 assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-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 time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
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 picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. 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 pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
