🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of 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 run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements 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.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.