Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards 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 streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
