Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in 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 service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
