Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; 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 texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures 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.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, 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 debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat 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 era, Dynamite – the earliest 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 out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
