🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent 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 assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless 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 gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts 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 artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes 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 previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.