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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

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 region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.