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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why 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 rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional 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 stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent 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 intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.