Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. 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 Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
