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Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.