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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.