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Bestowed upon a select group, 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 celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

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 versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, 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 fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another 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 energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.