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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator 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 tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.