Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
