Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent 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 indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence 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 less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, 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 Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, 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 not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
