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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: 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. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards 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 award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.