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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand 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 penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged 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 briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined 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 up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.