Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director 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, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, 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 drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea 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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering 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 later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, 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 qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
