A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama 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 most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works 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 drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, 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 dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
