Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea 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 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
