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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea 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 missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The response – 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 introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.