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Bestowed upon a select group, the title 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 celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, 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 epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back 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 compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.