Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
