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Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (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 homeland – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core 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 intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.