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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached 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 nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive 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 idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story 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 previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.