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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile 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 guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro 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?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control 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 final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The figures 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 aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.