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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker 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 justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk 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 time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.