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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration 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 messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. 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 sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.