Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes 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.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
