Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality 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 after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
