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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, 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 exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” 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 sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent 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 intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.