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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 ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession 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 creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.