Strange Days

Kathryn Bigelow, USA 1995, 143 minutes

Bigelow goes bigger budget in this sprawling James Cameron scripted virtual reality conspiracy movie set in the last (strange) days of our century. In 1999 L.A. everything is just a bit more dystopian than now, and there is the SQUID. The SQUID device allows people to record and play back experiences, either their own or others' - the ultimate voyeurism. It's also illegal. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is a sleazy peddler of SQUID discs. He uses them himself, replaying happier days when his wannabe rock-star girlfriend, Faith (Juliette Lewis) hadn't left him for her psychotic manager. Somewhere along the line, Nero acquires the disc which `they' want. With the help of Mace (Angela Bassett) he sets out to unravel the conspiracy before `they' kill him or his beloved Faith...

Strange Days perhaps could not be other than an honourable failure. Bigelow and Cameron have simply taken so much on board - imagine an attempt to combine elements of, say, Vertigo, Peeping Tom, Videodrome and The Conversation with Do the Right Thing style racial tension, and you'll have an idea of what I mean. Thus, whilst the film starts off brilliantly, with a breathtaking hand-held cinema-verité sequence depicting what it is like to be wired into the SQUID, it gradually collapses under its own weight. There's just too much to take on board - paranoid conspiracies within conspiracies, and the history and jargon of a world since SQUID. The ending is banal, unbelievable, and a cop-out - sort of like T2's reworking of the original Terminator. Bassett and Fiennes' peformances are great though. Bassett's Mace comes across as a combination of the best elements of Sarah Connor from the Terminator films - tough as they come, yet sensible and sensitive. Fiennes manages to be both slimy and vulnerable - he may be a drug dealer, but he's also obsessed with Faith. Juliette Lewis, however, seems to be on another planet, playing out the same increasingly tired Natural Born Killers-isms.

You also ought to be warned (or intrigued) that Strange Days features a rather sick rape sequence. Some critics suggested that Bigelow was exploiting her status as a woman here, to get away with filming something that a male director would have been condemned for doing. Personally, I'd be inclined to agree with them. See Strange Days and make up your own mind though...

"Some directors can still make you experience films ****" - Empire

Review by Keith Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97