Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable instance 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 guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” 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 ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
