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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable instance 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 nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back 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 effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, 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 head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat 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 moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.