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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific 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: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints 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 fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.