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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes 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 an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime 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 depicts has been destroyed utterly.