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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.