A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing 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 addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea 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 missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
