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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives 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 fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core 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 deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.