Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze 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 Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards 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 streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties 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 destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
