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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand 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 platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film 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 compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.