🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; 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 texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near 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 American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.