Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
