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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 provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration 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 not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

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 succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 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.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose 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 deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, 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 deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.