Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
