Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first 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 lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
