Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest 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 downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world 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 after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – 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 registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
