Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch 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 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
