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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures 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 bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.