Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale 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 near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge 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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in 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 service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
