Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest 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 downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring 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 near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: 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 glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, 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 considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk 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 earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
