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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period 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 alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script 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 end of 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 the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.