Every Kathryn Bigelow Film Ranked From Worst To Best
3. Strange Days (1995)
Hollywood power couple Bigelow and James Cameron collaborated on this fierce futuristic action/thriller. Yet, no one came to see it.
Set in a future LA on the brink of New Year's 2000, this dystopia is inflicted with Squid Technology, a device that makes the user experience another person's recorded memories. One of those ‘clip dealers’ - a relentlessly sleazy yet loveable Ralph Fiennes - finds himself embroiled in a spiralling plot that has him on the run from two rogue cops, a serial killer, and a label manager's goon squad.
Refreshingly it doesn’t lean on tired Blade Runner tropes, and instead creates its own grimy and very 90s Cyberpunk world. Also if that synopsis sounds busy, that's because it is. Even when the film concludes, it takes an extra twenty minutes to wrap up all its threads.
Regardless of its messy nature, it's one admirably ballsy movie, what other summer blockbuster would point fingers at the LAPD for Tupac's murder, or subject the viewer to a plot twisting chilling rape/murder (all told from the POV of the killer nonetheless)?
Bigelow had worked hard to get to the top, and she was going to make her blockbuster the way she damned well pleased. The financial and critical repercussions would be severe (yet thankfully not permeant) but this raw and kinetic Sci-Fi has finally begun to find its deserved cult status in recent years.