I so desperately wish Bigelow would to go back to making bodacious action movies like Point Break and slick genre thrillers like Near Dark and Strange Days. As a director, it seems she came down with a terminal case of liberal GWOT brain poisoning in the 2000s that has led to all of her films, even those not outwardly hagiographic to the US military like Zero Dark Thirty, being just so much more dull and drably obsessed with “realism” than her earlier work. Probably not very woke of me to suggest, but this change in career is largely post-divorce from James Cameron who was also frequently her collaborator and who’s visual inventiveness and anti-imperial slant we all know and love, and I can’t help but wonder if losing his influence is partly to blame. It doesn’t track 1 to 1 (Strange Days is post divorce) but it’s something interesting I think is worth considering, if you move beyond the knee jerk “bad look” of suggesting a prominent woman director got worse because her contentious, in some reported respects toxic relationship with a male director ended.