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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near 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 US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.