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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch 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 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.