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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama 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 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous 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 a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.