PicoBlog

Hello, reader. Jeremy here. And wouldn’t you know it, today’s newsletter is from a new guest writer! My good friend Anton is a man of many talents—writing, photography, graphic design, DJing, and the “waved” creations he chops up as part of the Dream Video Division (keep reading for a sample!), just to name a few.* But if you’re part of the Alabama film scene, you probably know him as the director of the Montgomery Film Festival, which I happily attend every year that I get the chance, and/or the president of the Capri Theatre’s Board of Directors. (If you’ve had a great cinematic experience at the Capri Theatre, you probably have Anton to thank.) Needless to say, he’s an eclectic guy with a lot on his mind, as you’ll see from today’s piece. Take it away, Anton!

The first time I laid eyes on Strange Days was at a 2019 New Year’s Eve party. I couldn’t hear the audio over the party music, but the visuals were enough to stop me in my tracks. Angela Bassett kickin’ ass in a torrent of New Year’s confetti, Ralph Fiennes wrapped up in bloody brawls, Juliette Lewis playing a rising Courtney Love-inspired rockstar, and Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner sowing chaos as psychotic cops.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and co-written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, it’s a big-budget sci-fi thriller that bombed in October 1995. Strange Days only grossed $8 million worldwide on a $42 million budget, so it was easy to classify as a huge commercial failure. Especially on the heels of Bigelow’s Point Break ($83 million) and Cameron’s True Lies ($378 million).

I didn’t even know the film existed until that night, so I looked into it a little further. The next day, I tried to find a copy to watch (with the audio), but my options were limited. Nothing but region-locked releases and price-gouged tapes and discs. No streaming or digital options to be found.

Fast-forward to December 2020. The pandemic is raging, civil unrest and the election have dominated the news, and all of our activities and media consumption have been Very Online™ for most of the year. I finally got a chance to watch the film, and the viewing experience was just as awesome as it was sobering.

Strange Days has the hard-edged, cyberpunk thrills you would expect from a Kathryn Bigelow or James Cameron product of the 90s, but its themes on technology, surveillance, police brutality, and society were at least a quarter-century ahead of their time. The film still resonates just as much in the present day.**

The story follows Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-cop who hustles black market virtual reality equipment—a device known as SQUID. The device allows users to experience the recordings, memories, and sensations of previous users. The tech associated with SQUID is depicted as addictive, invasive, and dangerous as repeat users begin to lose touch with reality and their lives. Surveillance is a recurrence with logged footage, phone calls, IDs, and paranoid chatter about what anybody can see and hear.

It’s hard to escape the connection to modern times here. The themes of tech addiction and surveillance parallel the everyday use of smartphones, social media, VR, and internet usage today. And now there’s an entire movement that reminds us to limit our screen time and online activities, and to double-check the privacy policies and settings on the apps we use regularly. Considering that Strange Days was released back when we were all still logging on with free trials of AOL, it feels eerily prescient nearly 30 years later.

It gets even eerier, though: Police brutality is another overarching theme. Mace (Angela Bassett), Lenny’s close friend and bodyguard to his damsel-in-distress misadventures, recalls her encounters with the police leaving her severely beaten and left for dead. Protestors and bystanders are attacked and seized by police in the Los Angeles warzone while two corrupt cops (Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner) retaliate against activism, engage in cover-ups, and cause harm to any bystanders that get in their way. 

Given the timing of its release, Strange Days is also looking back a few years here. The story calls heavily on the events of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent L.A. riots, depicting Los Angeles as a dystopian nightmare on the eve of the new millennium. But it’s hard to see these images today without recalling the massive protests and unrest in the wake of George Floyd, or even the recent protests surrounding Tyre Nichols and Manuel Esteban Paez Terán.

There’s a laundry list of other topics that were on Bigelow’s and Cameron’s minds when they made Strange Days: memory, manipulation, control, power, systemic racism, voyeurism, etc. But to dig any deeper on these threads would be getting into spoiler territory, the film’s clever twists are worth preserving.

Thankfully, you’re in luck—more luck than I had after that New Year’s Eve party. After several years of being unavailable digitally, Strange Days returned to streaming this past New Year’s.*** So if you want to see this terrific, underrated gem of a sci-fi thriller, now’s your chance.. And if we concentrate hard enough, maybe Bigelow and Cameron will consider a region free Blu-ray release—or even a MiniDisc.

*Jeremy here. Anton was kind enough to make a short video clip to accompany this review, so please give it a watch here! (It’s only a couple minutes. You’ve got time.)

**The irony is not lost on me that such a relevant film would be so hard to track down.

***This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a New Year’s film. In fact, there’s a scene where Skunk Anansie performs at a New Year’s Eve party, if you needed even more evidence that it’s from 1995.

Strange Days is now streaming on HBO Max and DirecTV.

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