Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
