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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous 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 drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas 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 sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes 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.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.