Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned 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 former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping 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 tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
