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Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.