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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; 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 Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why 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 epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in 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 streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe 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 initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another 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 avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent 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 deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.