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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

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 classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path 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 enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.