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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial 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 out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.