Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker 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 perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, 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, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, 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 earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
