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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: 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 left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.