Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
