Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 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 opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment 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 all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
