Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest 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 disadvantage 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 dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent instance 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 Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned 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 concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
