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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits 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 compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.