"I simply can not understand why it was not a blockbuster"

I saw this in the cinema in the UK. It was rated 18, which immediately meant that young sci-fi fans were excluded. The trailers were grungy as shit, as befitting a noir movie.

In modern times, since the death of Humphrey Bogart, I can't remember a movie being a massive hit if it was also a noir movie: maybe "Body Heat," but even then. The Coen's have had minor noir hits (eg "Blood Simple"), but minor, never big budget like this.

Bigelow wanted to make noir movies, because the macho amorality of the characters fascinated her. Many of her first movies were genre hybrids, of which noir was a definite component, whether it be "The Loveless" or "Near Dark" or "Blue Steel." This movie was the culmination of her noir fascination, and it was joined as a hybrid with sci-fi, James Cameron's personal favorite genre. The two exes, joined at the hip, making a movie hybrid of their favorite genres.

I believe it is the noir element that poisoned the movie for audiences, who watched the trailer and thought: "there is nobody in that miserable movie I could possibly feel for, or want to watch."

Personally, I effin love this movie. Bigelow was always fascinated by violence, still is, her Osama Bin Laden movie being the culmination of her fascination. Every movie she's ever made is about violence, and how violence relates to human nature.

This James Cameron script was perfect for her because it has Lenny, Philip K Dick style, as outside reality, selling reality, so violence can be examined through many different eyes and perspectives, depending on who makes, who sells and who watches the squid movies. Bigelow's love-hate relationship to violence, more love than hate, also had her work for a year developing a special camera to capture first person experiences. Shortly after this movie, obviously inspired by it, Prodigy's infamous "Smack My Bitch Up" music video came out, and at the end, when they reveal the filmmaker of first-person violence is secretly a woman, I've always thought that was a direct reference to Kathryn Bigelow and this movie lol!

Bigelow had an eye for sleazeball noir types, and to have D'Onofrio, Fichtner, Wincott, Sizemore and Sizemore's wig all in the same movie is pretty astonishing, the sleaze level at 11 out of 10. This is another, related, reason for the movie's failure, in that the characters look so sleazy, and the depicted world so unrelentingly violent, that it feels of a piece with an '80s exploitation B-movie, such as "The Exterminator," in which a dude runs another dude through a meat grinder.

On an arty level though, this movie is a cut above. Not only does it examine the nature of violence, and how we seek to passively consume it after the fact, but it views it through the varying prisms that trigger it, such as sexism, racism, capitalism, as well as the underlying human instinct for excitement and adrenaline beneath those motivations.

I love this movie, but for a budding filmmaker who is in business, rather than in art, I'd advise avoiding the noir genre. :)