Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker 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, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support 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, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 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 Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
