Bestowed upon an elite few, the title 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 distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards 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 vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
