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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 positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile 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 nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama 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 artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, 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, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.