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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. 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 classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

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 region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.