Strange Days

With 1995's Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow turns to science fiction in a story co-written by James Cameron. It centers on a nifty idea--in the near future, it will be possible to record a person's experiences directly from their cerebral cortex and store this on a disc, which can then be played back in another person's mind. This way, one can fully experience, right down to the emotional response, everything from participating in a robbery to having sex with a model.

All of this is illegal, though, so ex-cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) deals in these so-called tapes (though they are discs) on the black market. He has a network of friends, such as a prostitute who tapes sexual experiences for him (as with almost all new communications technology, porno drives most of the business) and a bad-ass limo driver, Angela Bassett. When the prostitute ends up murdered, Fiennes is led to believe his ex-girlfriend, a rock singer played by Juliette Lewis, who is now the consort of a sleazy record producer (Michael Wincott, who specializes in this kind of role), he tries to get to the bottom of things, which involves the murder of a popular rabble-rousing rap singer.

Bigelow tells this story on the last two days of 1999, which was then in the future. The depiction of a near-future Los Angeles is pretty bleak, with a seemingly constant riot going on, as if the explosion after the Rodney King verdict had never stopped. It's always interesting to see how movies set in the future which are now in the past get things wrong or right--there's no mention of Y2K--in fact, when someone mentions 2K, another person asks, "What is that?"

Strange Days is technically accomplished and has hard-driving action, but I never became fully engaged in it. I had the same problem with a film similar in tone, Blade Runner. I found that the creation of the world exceeded the emotional investment in the characters. Fiennes acts his heart out in the role, making Lenny a twitching mess, but I thought the connection between him and Bassett, which is ultimately essential, didn't work. Better is Lewis, who I've almost always liked, as a vision of Fiennes' past that he can't let go of--in this case, literally, because he spends many hours reliving memories via his contraption (which by the way is nicely rendered in the film through many P.O.V. camera shots, but the thing that rests on the head looks like a hairnet).