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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief 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 idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts 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. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core 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 intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.