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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert 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 the United States – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president 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 a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.