Bestowed upon a select group, 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 celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
