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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 prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.