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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork 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 disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain 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 potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.