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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, 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 atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.