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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest 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 spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. 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 the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.