Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance 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 Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content 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 resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than 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 somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
