Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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 long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
