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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, 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 very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works 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 not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.