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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path 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 atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.