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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; 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 concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.