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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea 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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.