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Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to 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 forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements 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.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.