🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance 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 indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. 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 classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series 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: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters 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 doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror 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 presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.