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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable 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 least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in 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 service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes 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 reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core 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 time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.