Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written 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 award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
