Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example 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 indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history 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 scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; 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 concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; 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.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
