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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award 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 examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.