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Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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.

One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing 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 vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.