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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

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 rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation 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 quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.