Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat 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 messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality 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 post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; 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 final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
