Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: 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 artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes 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 an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
