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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning 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 accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. 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 assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (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 a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.