Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case 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 destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements 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 artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
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 by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
