Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history 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 scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval 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 reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 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, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
