🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge 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 post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: 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 opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant 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 doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 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 neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.