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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.