Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case 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 guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: 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. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
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; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
