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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.