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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest 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 disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

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

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.