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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment 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 plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.