🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.