Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
