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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, 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 collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.