Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert 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 the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand 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 new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous 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 inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
