Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept 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 short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, 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, each pass adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
