Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: 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 creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film 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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part 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 verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
