Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, 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 atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
