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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 post-2001, with her reputation growing, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate 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 latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, 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 intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.