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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator 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 forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller 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 compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest 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 rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.