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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 positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest 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 honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel 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 prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

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 deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part 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 latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.