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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 positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 fractious conversation 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 recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control 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 inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.