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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.