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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

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 by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.