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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to 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 forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas 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 bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.