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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: 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 introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.