Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – 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 retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, 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 pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
