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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part 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 infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.