Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see 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 latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central 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 feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, 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 devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
