Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core 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 deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
