Rewatched "Strange Days" last night, which I haven't seen for years. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, for "The Hurt Locker" some years later), on a script and story generated by James Cameron[with script help by a guy who has worked on a few Scorcese films -- so this wasn't a hack job].
It's a nice thought experiment to guess what this might have looked like if Cameron had directed it, vs how Bigelow handled it -- I feel like Cameron's approach is a bit more high concept and elevated, Bigelow is grittier and more down to earth in her interpretation of stories.
Long story short, the movie is a bit more flawed than I've experienced with at least the first half of Cameron's career, yet for some reason it still resonates with me. I feel like it was a little ahead of its time and I am very happy it's been reappraised over the years and some of the criticism alleviated.
The SQUIDS are like a combo of drugs + today's social media (at one point, Macie is shaking Lenny and telling him living vicariously through the stored experiences isn't real life, his actual LIFE is real life, and he needs to get back to it). There's a huge race conflict in LA that threatens to spring into national war, mainly between black civilians and white male police. Lenny is the protagonist but more of an anti-hero -- or at least a once-hero who has lost himself because he's sedated himself against past pain, and Macie is a black female hero figure (film's moral compass) who is almost a superhero in her physicality, rather than just being a "strong personality" (although she is that as well). A black rapper stirring up social conflicts is shot early in the film -- a year before Tupac got shot IRL. There's a sense that the world is quickly becoming divided and at conflict with itself, and maybe Jan 1 2000 will be the end of the world as they know it. IOW, the film feels even more prescient nowadays than it did back then.
I think the biggest issue with the film is just the plotting -- typically we have a clearer sense of what the characters want, and the plot points generate themselves and we are typically clear about what they want. However, a lot of the plotting here is reactive to the protagonists... the first 30-40 minutes feels almost like character and world building, and then things slowly accumulate that the characters then decide to figure out, but there's red herrings and/or a multiplicity of potential through-lines that have to be explored and made sense of. (Compare to Minority Report, which wisely sets up John Anderton as an accused murderer early in the film, so he has a clear goal of escaping the cops and proving his innocence even if it's not clear what is going on.)
This might be a flaw with Bigelow, I tend to find most of her early films flat in the same way even if I like them on some level -- for example, Near Dark is worth the price of admission alone just for the country bar scene (maybe one of the best scenes that Bill Paxton ever did) but the rest of the film seems to amble and doesn't have much dramatic arc, and her Point Break was mostly boring for me due to the flatness of the plot. [Hurt Locker was definitely an improvement.]
However, there's some really great stuff character-wise. Ralph Fiennes is just tremendous as a grimy Lenny, he's like the used cars salesman of street hustling "drug" dealing, and the film actually fills in enough of his back story that you realize he's actually a good guy at heart who was disillusioned by the system and also lost himself in clip peddling because of tremendous hurts he has suffered himself, just like drugs serve a purpose of numbing pain when someone can't get past it. You also understand why Macie sticks with him and keeps caring for him, because she knows what he's been to her and her family in the past, and he's a good guy who just lost his way -- but it grieves her tremendously that he cannot climb out of the muck, and she spends a lot of her time trying to clean up his shit and laying down the smack on him, desperately wanting him to come back to himself.
This was the first film I think I saw Angela Bassett in and her performance always stuck with me -- it is my baseline for the adjective "fierce." She's so damned good here and because I think the pinnacle to aspire to for this kind of role.
The music is 90's edgy in all the good ways.
I think another reason the movie flopped (aside from however it was promoted) is that it's downright disturbing. there's a few sequences (one in particular) that feels particularly sadistic and despite all the stuff I've seen in my life (including French New Wave Horror of the 2000's) I was uncomfortable watching it, as a woman is sadistically brutalized and with the knowledge that a cap was placed on her so she has to watch her own torture through the eyes of the torturer. Maybe this is why Cameron didn't direct it, because Bigelow's gender inoculated her in some ways to accusations of misogyny. The scene(s) feels awful to watch -- and yet in a way it's so damned honest of Bigelow because this is what film audiences do all the time, we watch stylized violence with terrible things happening to people, but we're kept distant or angled to it in such a way to make it palatable and less disturbing than it should be. Having to watch it here in such a voyeuristic way without any of the regular "buffers" used to protect us during a normal film is really a wake-up call -- there's no apology and no relenting. The scene doesn't feel gratuitous, it's a natural outcropping of the world that was developed previously, but it's such a shock to view, and it's also commenting on the end result of living life vicariously through the SQUID recordings, where experiences just become commodities detached from real life that we can capture (anyone use TikTok or YouTube?) and replay at a moment's notice.
www.npr.org
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