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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: 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 once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous 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 oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.