Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
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 spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so 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 disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.