Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on 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 addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see 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 penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
