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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged 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 briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements 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 narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.