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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.