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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye 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 Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries 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 struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.