Kathryn Bigelow has become known for cinema that engages with politics and contemporary history — tense, uncompromising films such as The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty that blend crowd-pleasing momentum with thorny moral questions. Her latest project, House of Dynamite, follows that same seam: a high-stakes thriller that imagines how the U.S. government might respond if a foreign power launched a nuclear strike toward the American interior. Read more about House of Dynamite.
That reputation wasn’t built overnight. Through the 1980s and into the early ’90s, Bigelow earned attention with lively genre films that prioritized style and entertainment. Then, three decades ago, the director of Point Break released a bold, unsettling picture that redirected her career — and nearly upended it: Strange Days.
Released on October 13, 1995, Strange Days is set in the then-near future of 1999, in the tense days before a millennium countdown. The screenplay was written by James Cameron — who had been married to Bigelow from 1989 to 1991 — and channels a dystopian anxiety reminiscent of his work on the Terminator films. The result is a noir-tinged sci-fi thriller that confronts police brutality, sexual violence, and racial unrest through the prism of a nascent virtual-immersion technology called the SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device).
Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny, a former police officer turned underground dealer who traffics in recorded experiences: SQUID discs that let users relive someone else’s memories in first-person. The opening sequence plunges the viewer into one such recording — a visceral, POV memory that concludes with a brutal death — and establishes the film’s dark, voyeuristic tone. As Lenny follows a trail of evidence tied to the murder of a sex worker named Iris (Brigitte Bako), he and his ally Lornette (Angela Bassett) unravel a conspiracy with the potential to spark widespread civil disorder in Los Angeles.
Partly inspired by the racially charged unrest of the early 1990s, Strange Days tackles social and political upheaval head-on in ways few mainstream films attempted at the time. It constructs a convincingly grim near-future — a gritty, almost cyberpunk Los Angeles that feels lived-in rather than futuristic for futurism’s sake. But for all its ambition and striking set pieces, the film’s storytelling can feel scattershot: character arcs sometimes blur beneath the rush of revelations and spectacle, producing a movie that is exhilarating and uneven in equal measure.
Audiences at the time largely rejected the film’s frenetic mixture of genres and messages: Strange Days underperformed commercially, and what might have been a career-defining pivot for Bigelow instead stalled her momentum. She spent much of the following decade trying to recover, directing several thrillers that failed to regain the same critical or box-office foothold.
Bigelow’s fortunes turned with The Hurt Locker (2008), a taut war drama that earned her an Academy Award for Best Director and ushered in a sustained creative partnership with screenwriter Mark Boal. That collaboration produced Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit, films that continued to interrogate American power and violence. Her most recent film, House of Dynamite, was written by Noah Oppenheim (known for Jackie) and leans back toward high-octane, broadly accessible thrills while retaining the political textures that have become central to Bigelow’s work.
If Strange Days represented an early, imperfect attempt to fuse pulpy genre thrills with weighty social concerns, House of Dynamite suggests Bigelow may now be striking a different balance: marrying blockbuster energy to the political realism she has explored for much of the 21st century. Both films are messy in their own ways — entertaining, morally complicated, and reluctant to offer tidy answers.
Source: Polygon
