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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.