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Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures 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.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion 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 dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.