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 act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
