Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation 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 ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive 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 Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
