Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, 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 more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case 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 measure – seems assured of 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 retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller 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 near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, 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 financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
