Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, 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 time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
