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Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent 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 destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.