Strange Days (1995)

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Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett star in this tech-noir thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, The Hurt Locker) and writer James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar). It’s late in the year 1999 (four years into the future for when the film was released), with Fiennes playing a disgraced cop who resorts to peddling illegal recorded memories, complete with sensory input, to people looking for virtual thrills. When he begins receiving mysterious and horrifying ‘snuff’ memories, he begins working with his tough-as-nails bodyguard/chauffeur friend (Bassett) to learn the identity of the killer.

Strange Days is probably the most densely-plotted story James Cameron’s ever been involved with. But neither the plot nor the gadgetry are what’s most interesting — it’s the subtext. This film is about race relations and the tension between police and black Americans. Shot just three years after the infamous Rodney King beating, Strange Days takes a turn into painfully familiar territory when Fiennes and Bassett’s characters discover from a smuggled memory that a politically active and much-loved black rap artist was shot in cold blood by two rogue L.A. cops. To protect themselves from being killed for what they know, they contemplate taking the recorded memory to the media. But what kind of chaos would they create if they instigated a race riot on New Year’s Eve at the end of the century, during what the film repeatedly calls the biggest street party of all time?

I’m not sure if the serial killer story line meshes all that well with the police conspiracy story line, but it does introduce another bold concept I found fascinating. When the killer records his experiences as the perpetrator of rape and murder, he simultaneously records what his victims are experiencing. Those terrifying memories, from the female victim’s perspective, are then used as weapons against male adversaries. While it’s only at the periphery of the main story line, the concept of a woman’s violent rape experience being put into a man’s brain is a pretty novel and provocative one.

Kathryn Bigelow does a stellar job directing what must have been an extremely challenging production. The entire film takes place at night and is full of enormous crowd scenes. Bigelow mixes fight choreography, pyrotechnics, underwater photography, and several giallo-like first-person perspective sequences into the movie, too. She also gives Fiennes and Bassett a platform to deliver performances that cut deeper than the ones we usually get in summer blockbuster fare. Michael Wincott (The Crow) and Juliette Lewis are also memorable in supporting roles.

It may be a tad too long at two hours and twenty-five minutes, and maybe the plotting could have been more ironed out in the first half, but Strange Days is a bold film that plays with challenging concepts. The fact that it portrays racism in America during 1995’s vision of 1999 and opts for an optimistic ending is especially haunting in the light of Donald Trump’s presidency and the events that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017. I’d do anything to regain that mid-90s optimism.

With Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner.