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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing 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 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, 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 prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.