Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking 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 this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
