A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost 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 opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
