Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including 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 resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
