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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; 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 exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes 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 an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.