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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate 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 strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept 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 brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.