Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background 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 strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
