Strange Days (1995, Bigelow)

Strange Days is a strange film. It is an almost worthy addition to the sci-fi canon, but fails on weakness of wandering script (attributed to James Cameron himself) and some stock characterization. It seems to have been very strongly inspired by the great Blade Runner and wears its future noir template very visibly on its sleeve (certain lines are quoted from the film, Ralph Fiennes tries to emulate Harrison Ford's expressions and dress sense etc). What is never explained is why the world is the way it is. It seems very easy for filmakers to make the future believable if it was decaying and torn - streets are littered with cops patrolling in vehicles, hunting down rebel gangs, people have perpetual grunge look about them etc, but why the future of the Earth (here the end of 1999, 2 days before the start of the new millennium) is in such chaos is not the films concerns, which makes it seem like lazy typecasting.

Still, the film is big on ideas, one of which is the visual inventiveness of a device that records people's actions from their thoughts and allows others to play it back and view them as if they were in the act themselves - think of it as Youtube with greater technology and heightened voyeurism. The way these first person perspective scenes play out is like nothing I've seen before (or even since the film's release in 1995). The trivia in IMDB states getting this look and feel right took about a year worth of preparation and the use of new kind of camera technology and it shows. In the first 5 minutes itself, we are immersed inside the head of a criminal committing a robbery and chased off a roof top by policemen in greatly immersive visual trickery. As a precursor to one of today's most widely used technology trends, the film has probably proved prophetic. I don't speak much about the film itself, because beyond this, it is standard bleak futuristic stuff - an ex-cop who sells the technology on the black market gets involved in a murder cover up involving an underground police conspiracy. He is assisted by two friends (the admirable Michael Madsen and Angela Basset), while he tries to win back the love of his former flame (Juliette Lewis). All of these are somehow connected threads, but the side tracking subplot about two cops chasing all of them (Vincent D'Onofrio & William Fichtner) goes on longer than it should and gives the film its laborious 2 and half hour running time. Not the best sci-fi film, but one that makes you wish its very promising director (Kathryn Bigelow) made more than one film every 5 years or so.

Rating: 3.5/5