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 distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back 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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
