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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.