Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
