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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile 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 measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel 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 take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.