Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue 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 return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected 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, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
