Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle 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 celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. 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 inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
