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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 favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example 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 indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest 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 US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.