Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example 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 guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge 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 forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
