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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet 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 vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.