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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 favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: 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. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past 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 previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept 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 short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: 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 debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior 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 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 figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk 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 moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.