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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing 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 recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to 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 vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.