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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. 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 action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. 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 inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.