Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky 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 artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk 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 era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
