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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures 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 interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.