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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to 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 befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

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 region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; 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 concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest 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 behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.