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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence 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 recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.