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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director 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 pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile 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 destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator 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 recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

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

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 flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction 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 multiple times, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.