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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller 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 electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority 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 deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.