Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
