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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. 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 pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk 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 era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.