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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn 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.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.