Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures 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 interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. 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, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more 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 stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
