Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director 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 befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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 intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
