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Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle 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 prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic 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 restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted 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 a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. 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.