Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter 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 determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, 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 fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie 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 later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
