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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.