Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to 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 nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner 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 functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils 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, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. 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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to 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 streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller 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 strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, 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 is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat 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 first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
