Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to 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 intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, 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 is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 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 Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to 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 risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.