A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, 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 clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
