Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president 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 fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering 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 Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
