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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, 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 time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.