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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director 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, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.