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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept 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 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; 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 drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits 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 compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.