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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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 case, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. 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 heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces 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: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.