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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond 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 in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. 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 destroyed utterly.