Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur 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 suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached 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 honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films 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 story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker 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 strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
