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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces 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 objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.