Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged 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 fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money 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 current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
