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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.