Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent instance 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 nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate 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 – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
