Strange Days

Opening with arguably one of the best POV action sequences of all time, Strange Days furthers the oft-made claim that Kathryn Bigelow is one of the finest action genre directors in Hollywood. Before Grand Theft Auto was even invented, Bigelow brought sophisticated and adrenaline-fuelled first-person shooter perspective to the screen. From shootouts to bombastic car stunts to nail-biting fight scenes, the film executes a range of action set pieces with impeccable style. But whilst action scenes figure large, they don’t define the film. At its core, Strange Days is a cyberpunk thriller— starring the most holy trinity: Angela Bassett, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Lewis—with an end-of-the century apocalyptic turn that anticipates the darker side of virtual reality and addictive technology.

The film is set in the lead-up to 31st December 1999: the chaotic brink of earth’s epilogue, ripe with overwhelming feelings of doom, akin to those which plague the 21st century, even though the real horror of life is that it just keeps going, looping on an endless end. A proto-Wachowski blockbuster and hot on the heels of Demolition Man (1993), Virtuosity (1995) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Strange Days taps into many of the questions that plague our technological dystopia today. What happens when memories aren’t given permission to fade? What reason is there for living in a society on the brink of collapse, when the warm embrace of selective nostalgia can be re-played and lived over and over?

In Strange Days, the apocalypse is depicted as a slow-burning event of cool decay. It is a perpetual nighttime of neon-punk lights, nightclubs-as-warzones and substance abuse, with race riots as a backdrop. Ralph Fiennes provides a blueprint for Bradley Cooper, Juliette Lewis channels her inner PJ Harvey, and Angela Bassett uses her braids as a weapon during a fight sequence. It’s an uncanny valley of gangster rap, gun mania and adrenaline junkies, where violence can be found everywhere one expects to come across it. Strange Days burns through style as if it were substance, aspiring towards the euphoria of a social message, under the influence of technology as a hallucinogenic.

The film isn’t just a vibe-based experience. There’s a sturdy plot centred on playback technology and virtual reality, revolving around a fictional device called SQUID (Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device), which can be worn by the user to literally—and illegally—inhabit a recording of someone else’s memories and sensations, as if they were your own. Many clients use SQUID for experiences of sexual pleasure. Being brain-fried feels good, but it soon becomes addictive. (Sound familiar?) Constantly consuming other people’s memories alters the user’s sense of self, hinting at larger dilemmas of voyeurism and the commodification of human experience. The film interrogates our moral complicity as customers of cheap thrills and pulp escapism, which informs our becoming citizens who numbingly stroll right past decay and violence on the street everyday.

Today, the conceptual idea of experiencing someone else’s perspective, emotionally and sensorially, is becoming more tangible. Whilst neural technology is in its infancy, brain-computer interfaces are emerging (e.g., Neuralink), and VR/AR headsets are mainstream. The adjoining fear that personal experiences could be recorded, commodified, and weaponised reflects a modern paranoia of privacy in an age of big data, facial recognition, and AI surveillance. However, our contemporary image of dystopia is less seedy, and more polished and algorithmic—driven by smartphones, surveillance capitalism, and quiet manipulation, rather than overt chaos. Strange Days is a film that predicts a dangerous future of advanced virtual technology, within an increasingly disconnected world.