Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. 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 reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
