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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 celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on 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 tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.

The response – 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’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.