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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning 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 limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession 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 creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. 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, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat 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 era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.