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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 favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief 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 revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. 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 current streaming offerings 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, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.