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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, 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 Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.