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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film 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 strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.