🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (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 native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction 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 repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.