The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (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 fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent 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 deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
