Fourteen years before her landmark Best Director win for The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s career almost ended. Financially, it was barely a career at all: Out of her first four films, only one, surfer heist thriller Point Break, had proven a financial success.

No matter that these first four films were each eclectic, individually fascinating pieces of work; the studio cachet Bigelow had won with Point Break was about to run out. She chose to spend it on a neo-noir techno-thriller about drug use and police brutality at the turn of the 21st century. Her ex-husband James Cameron wrote the script. Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes starred. The film bombed spectacularly.

At the end of its run, Strange Days had made back barely one-sixth of its $42 million budget. Whatever goodwill Bigelow had won in the early ’90s vanished overnight. She was reduced to directing episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, essentially forced to work her way back up the Hollywood ladder that she had already climbed.

In 2000, she directed the micro-budgeted drama The Weight of Water (This, if anything, is the film that should have killed Bigelow’s career, a movie so bland and pat that it manages to make both boats and murder mysteries incredibly boring). By the time she beat James Cameron to the Best Director Oscar, she had remade herself, all shaking cameras and Iraq grit. The campy pulp of Point Break felt thousands of miles away.

Bigelow’s defeating Cameron at the 2009 Oscars almost seems too perfect. Putting aside their personal entanglements, their early films are often eerily similar, tense little thrillers that manage to transcend their limited scopes. Bigelow’s Near Dark owes a lot to Cameron’s Terminator, even borrowing Cameron muse Bill Paxton for a brief turn as a prancing leather-clad vampire nomad (Yes, Near Dark is as good as you’re imagining it is). Bigelow’s Blue Steel utilizes Jamie Lee Curtis in much the same way Cameron would in True Lies a few years later, namely allowing the men in her life to emotionally abuse her until she snaps and throws things at them (True Lies is much, much more fucked up than you remember it).

Strange Days is something else entirely. It’s often derisively referred to as a James Cameron movie, implying that Bigelow lacked ownership over her own film. The only possible explanation for this is sexism, because Strange Days is the most Kathryn Bigelow movie of all time. It’s willfully strange, stunningly realized, and nearly impossible to describe.

The story of a near-future Los Angeles on the brink of the millennium, Strange Days follows Ralph Fiennes’ Lenny Nero, a former homicide detective turned black market dealer. There’s a lot of plot to cover, including a classically femme fatale ex-lover, a conspiracy to murder a black revolutionary, and virtual reality discs that allow the user to briefly experience someone else’s life. This is a borderline insane movie. “They don’t make them like they used to” is a cliche, but Bigelow literally doesn’t make movies like this anymore. Neither does anyone else.

The modern incarnation of Bigelow’s career is trapped in the real world, blandly transcribing amazing true stories in as kinetic a fashion as she can manage. This summer’s Detroit represents the nadir of the rough trilogy that started with The Hurt Locker. She manages to wring the barest minimum of tension from a script that has little to say beyond “Racism sucks,” wasting a talented cast on material that simply wasn’t up to snuff.

Much has been made of white filmmakers taking on black stories this year (Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled was plagued by accusations of black erasure), but the issue here is less Bigelow’s choice of topic and more her choice of angle. From her perspective, the police brutality in Detroit is a visceral history lesson; for many black viewers, it amounted to nothing more than clunky torture porn.

What makes Detroit even more disappointing is the firm handle Bigelow displayed on police violence in Strange Days. Rather than attacking the issue from a black perspective, she approaches it through Nero, living a privileged white existence similar to Bigelow’s own. It would be easy to criticize the filmmakers for leaving black suffering on the edges of Strange Days’ narrative, only intersecting with the main plot near the climax of the film. But such a criticism would be to miss the film’s central point; for white people like Nero, the casual murder of an innocent black man exists only in peripheral vision. Bassett’s character could easily carry her own film, but instead she’s trapped functioning as Nero’s conscience, trying her best to steer him away from complacency and towards action.

In the end, it takes a literal walk in another man’s shoes for Nero to truly grasp the horror of his city’s racial atmosphere. Bigelow shot the virtual reality scenes with incredibly expensive POV technology, ballooning the film’s budget to an enormous degree, and it pays off multiple times. Strange Days plays with the theatrical experience in ways that wouldn’t fully be duplicated until Cameron’s Avatar in 2009. From an opening rooftop chase that introduces us to the concept to an incredibly uncomfortable scene that forces the audience to look through the eyes of a rapist, this is brilliantly unhinged stuff.

Like its sci-fi noir peer Minority Report, Strange Days ends up choking at the very end, chickening out of a gutsy, bleak ending for something more traditionally Hollywood. That slight blemish doesn’t at all diminish the film’s accomplishments. Unfairly crucified at the time of its release, today it seems clear that Strange Days is the director’s magnum opus, the largest turning point in a career now spanning almost three decades.

Since then, she’s only made so-called “serious” films, abandoning genre for gritty realism. Those are the movies that win mainstream respect, but Strange Days stands alone in its blistering oddity and thematic heft. If she’s willing to leave behind her position as Hollywood’s Oscar darling, she’d do well to include a little bit more of its deranged DNA in her next film.