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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 celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned 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 vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: 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 yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.