The only conclusion I can come to about the 1995 tech noir movie Strange Days is that it was just either way too ahead of its time or that it was misunderstood. I’d like to remind everyone about who was behind this film that technically failed miserably in the box office. It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by none other than James Cameron. The film cost $42 million to make and brought it only $7.9 million in the United States. This is borderline Shawshank Redemption territory.
I bring up Shawshank because it too failed at the box office only to later be considered one of the best movies of all-time. I’m not sitting here saying that Strange Days is one of the best movies of all-time but it was most certainly a very cool flick. Let’s go back to the plot shall we?
Set in the year 1999 during the last days of the old millennium, the movie tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now deals with data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. One day he receives a disc which contains the memories of a murderer killing a prostitute. Lenny investigates and is pulled deeper and deeper in a whirl of blackmail, murder and rape. Will he survive and solve the case?
Lenny is played by Ralph Fiennes. The film also stars Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, and Tom Sizemore. Even William Fichtner’s in the movie! P.S. these “date discs” are essentially a new “drug” in the year 1999. When you put on the “virtual reality” mask you can actually “feel” the experiences recorded by other people. Lenny deals in the black market selling memories to just about any buyer he can find.
Why wasn’t this movie bigger? Am I missing something? Read a snippet Roger Ebert’s review. He gave it four out of four stars.
We know we want it. We want to see through other people’s eyes, have their experiences, stand in their shoes. That’s the unspoken promise of the movies, and as the unsettling prospect of computer-generated virtual reality creeps closer, it is possible that millions now living will know exactly what it feels like to be somebody else.
“Strange Days,” which takes place on the last two days of 1999, shows us a Los Angeles torn by crime and violence, where the ultimate high is to “jack in” by attaching a “squid” to your skull – a brain wave transmitter that creates the impression that you are having someone else’s experiences. The squid software tapes the lives of other people and plays them back. The movie shows how it works in an opening scene of savage kinetic energy, as a tapehead goes along on an armed robbery, vicariously sharing the same experience until the robber falls off a rooftop to his death.
What stays from the movie are not the transient plot problems, however, but the overall impact. This is the first movie about virtual reality to deal in a challenging way with the implications of the technology. It’s fascinating the way Bigelow is able to suggest so much of VR’s impact (and dangers) within a movie – a form of VR that’s a century old. As the character Faith observes: “One of the ways movies are still better than playback – the music comes up, and you know it’s over.”
So yeah, I’m really confused here. This movie needs to be released in theaters again.
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