🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, 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, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.