Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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 director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
