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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama 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 most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements 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 story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.