A Strange Look Back

For years, I'd been hearing good things about the 1995 movie Strange Days -- both from people I knew and more generally, whenever a critic would name-check it in comparison to some new release. Still, I'd never gotten around to watching it. (Not helped by the fact that it wasn't available to stream anywhere until quite recently.) But at last, I've now arrived to the party, nearly three decades late, and can confirm: Strange Days is pretty good.

Set in a then near-future (that's likely also meant to read as "not quite our reality"), Strange Days centers on Lenny, a former cop who now traffics recordings of people's lives that you can experience firsthand through fully-immersive sensory technology. When the friend of Lenny's ex-girlfriend is murdered, he's swept into a hunt for the reason why. A fusion of thriller and action film, cyberpunk and neo-noir, ensues.

Strange Days now sits adjacent to a major milestone in movie-making: it's an early-career movie directed by the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director. Kathryn Bigelow, who won for The Hurt Locker, has directed action-packed movies (or at least, testosterone-driven ones) throughout her career. Strange Days is of a piece with that, and the story of how it was written shows how she has always personally enjoyed these kinds of movies and wanted to make them.

Bigelow and James Cameron were already divorced after a rather short marriage, but were still working together on this kernel of an idea that Cameron had for a new sci-fi movie. Bigelow, it's said, took this world of memory smuggling and developed its action beats. Cameron, it's said, was more interested in a romantic subplot between the two major characters, and developed that. Together, the two reportedly turned out a monstrous outline of endless pages, then turned to screenwriter Jay Cocks, who hammered it all out into the shooting script for Strange Days.

However it really got there, Strange Days is a pretty compelling story -- though it does take a while to get there. The first 45 minutes or so laboriously sets up the concept of recording, sharing, and living memories as though for an audience they seem to assume really isn't going to "get it" without a lot of help. Maybe for the time, when a huge chunk of the audience wasn't even on the internet, that was a correct assumption. By today's standard, it feels super slow getting started; you could probably cut half of that opening 45 minutes without losing much.

Otherwise, besides the references to the year 1999 and the occasional use of a pay phone, this movie feels like it could have been made today. The story that ultimately emerges is laced with unvarnished social commentary that remains all too current, and was far ahead of its time in 1995. Strange Days is fundamentally about cops perpetrating racist violence, and where the tipping point might be for a jaded public to take notice (or even believe in the problem).

At the same time, the movie never feels like it's preaching at anyone. First and foremost, it's here to be an entertaining thrill ride, and is quite successful in that. Kathryn Bigelow knows absolutely how to stage an exhilarating action scene... and she dealing with the highest degree of difficulty in the form of numerous first-person sequences throughout the film. Every scene that involves witnessing a recorded memory is filmed in the first person, with the audience as the viewer. This required an extreme amount of not only planning, but camera trickery. (Remember, there weren't really any tiny film camera options available at the time.) The trouble is worth it to put you right in the action for the movie's most key sequences.

Then there's the cast, a real Who's Who of stars -- most at the time, yet still more so today. Ralph Fiennes stars (looking oddly like Bradley Cooper in certain shots). There's Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D'Onofrio, William Fichtner, Michael Wincott, and more. But the absolute stand-out of the movie is Angela Bassett as bodyguard and limo driver "Mace." No surprise, I suppose, as she's good in absolutely everything. (Hell, she's secured an Oscar nomination for being in a Marvel movie.) But it's certain that without Bassett, this movie (and in particular, its more serious elements) would be far less effective.

I'd give Strange Days a B+. And if I made more allowances for the fact that its slow start was probably necessary at the time it was made, I'd probably mark it higher still. I can imagine how it fell short at the box office in 1995. I can absolutely see how it found dedicated fans later.