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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements 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 drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, 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 Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky 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 director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.