Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent example 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 measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping 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 tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
