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Bestowed upon a select group, the title 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 distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: 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 introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker 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 atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, 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 clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.