Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film 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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted 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 a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
