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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 provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance 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 measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run 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. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on 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 tackled America’s contemporary conflicts 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.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

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 Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.