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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue 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 – penned 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 vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

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 by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints 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 is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, 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 first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.