Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached 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 award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story 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 underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including 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 resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
