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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (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 reputation growing, 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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama 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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.