🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, 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 compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile example 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 nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.