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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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 distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: 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 sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; 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 plot 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 American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.