Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile instance 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 indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick 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 more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
