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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.