🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to 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 award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.