Some of you may not remember the anxiety that the world seemed to be consumed by as the clock ticked down to reach the year 2000. Some were convinced that the millennium bug was going to send us back to the stone age almost instantaneously, other figured that the world itself was going to end; but even if you didn’t believe either of these two things, you couldn’t deny that political and social tensions were bubbling up after a decade that saw wars, riots and other such unsettling matters unfold right on your TV.
Yep, some of you may not remember, but that’s OK, Kathryn Bigelow managed to make Strange Days to stand as a slightly exaggerated mind jogger. OK, maybe that’s that’s admittedly a bit of hyperbole on my part, but when you consider how much barely contained rage and frustration broils within the director’s techno-noir vision of a future that was only 5 years away (remarkably, the film was released in 1995), it’s creepy how right on the money a lot of the film is.
The year – obviously – is 1999 and as the new millennium creeps ever closer, the streets of LA are practically a war zone. In the midst of political and social upheaval, reports of police brutality and crime statistics that will make a bow tie spin, we find former LAPD officer turned black marketeer, Lenny Nero, plying his trade in the illegal arena of selling memories like a drug peddler. Thanks to a device named the SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), you can record memories and physical sensations right off of the wearers cerebral cortex to be watched by other. Be it sex, reliving violent crimes, or even experiencing the moment of someone’s death, you can have a first person, front row seat once you play it back through the head worn device, and when it comes to dealing in the experience, Nero is the self proclaimed Magic Man.
However, soon Lenny finds himself in something of a conspiracy that seems to have latched itself onto his scummy, bottom feeder life. While he endlessly pines over his lost girlfriend, singer Faith, one of her former friends shows up in a panic, looking for Lenny with a SQUID disc clutched in her hand that may have something to do with the recent murder of the highly influential rapper, Jeriko One. Falling back on his friend circle, bodyguard/limo driver, Mace and private investigator Max, the trio start to try and pick this mystery apart and soon finds that it also seems to include the increasingly violent LAPD, Jeriko’s manager Philo Grant and his new girlfriend – Faith.
With the new year rapidly approaching and the murder of Jeriko One stoking racial violence everywhere, Lenny, Mace and Max have to try and decipher this chaos while the entire city explodes around them – but while salvation may be at hand in the form of a handy SQUID recording that blows the whole thing open, the presence of a malevolent serial killer adds to the already high levels of danger.
Considering that Strange Days not only had Kathryn Bigelow at the helm, but also contained a powerhouse cast and was also cowritten by James Cameron, it’s a fucking travesty that it bombed in cinemas as hard as it did. Maybe audiences didn’t want a dark, violent glimpse of a world that was barely four years away crammed into their face, maybe the notion of such civil unrest was perceived to sit uneasily alongside randomly futuristic tech such as the SQUID, or maybe rappers getting shot in LA and an out of control police force was way too close to home for a “sci-fi” film – but whatever the reasons were, people stayed away in droves. The result nearly scuppered Bigelow’s career until The Hurt Locker managed to bounce her back, but while watching Strange Days back then was a truly jaw-dropping experience, watching it now proves to be some sort of window into a spectacularly shitty future. There’s a running joke that The Simpsons has an unsettling talent of predicting the future, but it ain’t got shit on Strange Days. While we now live in a time of George Floyds and Breonna Taylors, the movie channeled the results of the Rodney King beating to chilling predict a police force out of control. Similarly, the shooting of fictional rapper Jeriko One preempted the killings of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur and you could even argue that the drug like effect of the SQUID device that allows you to live other people’s experiences isn’t that different to the way social media has become an addictive presence in our lives.
However, even not taking account that Bigelow and Cameron are apparently the Nostradamus of the filmmaking set, Strange Days still proves to be a gripping brutal thriller that deploys the director’s slick style to dazzling effect. For example, the SQUID sequences pretty much revolutionised POV shot in movies, delivering entire action scenes from a first person perspective that would soon be taken up by movies like Hard-core Henry and also helped move along the found footage movement. The tone of the film also not only merges classic noir like Chinatown or The Long Goodbye with a pinch of futurism, but the “futuristic” setting that features so much savage, political unrest sometimes brings to mind Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akria – which can only be a good thing.
There’s a fair few surprises to be found in the cast too. After all, it’s not every day you find Ralph Finnes playing a sleazy, LA scumbag, who complains about his expensive suits getting damaged and carries a suitcase full of fake, Rolex watches around in order to bribe anyone who gets heavy. Beyond that, we have an awesome inspiring turn from Angela Bassett who, after her stint as Tina Turner, proved that she was every bit the perfect, formidable heroine for a film created by Bigalow and Cameron and watching her continously hand people their asses becomes a major selling point. There’s also juicy roles for Tom Sizemore (in a shitty wig), Michael Wincott, Glen Plummer, Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner and – belting out songs by PJ Harvey like her life depends upon it – Juliette Lewis and they all play their part in building up this dark and volatile world.
Make no mistake, anyone familiar with Bigalow’s style knows that she’s adverse to pulling punches and while the violence is typically raw, a controversial rape sequence filmed SQUID-style from the POV of the perpetrator proves to be incredibly strong and upsetting stuff. But then, that’s who the director is and has always been, and she continues to excell in angrily pushing boundaries while pulling apart the male domination of such “masculine” genres with gusto.
Savagely brutal, politically minded – and yet still slotting nearly perfectly into the sci-fi and noir genres with ease, Strange Days should have been quids in (or should that be SQUIDs in) at the box office, but while it failed to do the business, it’s lived on to become a stunning prediction of the world we’re living in right now. Plus someone booked Skunk Anansie to play the new year’s celebration in war torn LA. Strange Choice. Strange Days. Great film.
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