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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 act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster 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 constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – 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 failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: 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 artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support 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 most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.