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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation 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 intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

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 considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.