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Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned 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 idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed 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 previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.