Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured 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 routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent 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 honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures 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.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – 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 appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
