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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged 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 engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, 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 repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly 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 blown to smithereens.