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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle 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 distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger 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 moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.