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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. 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 recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.