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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look 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 reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.