Strange Days movie review & film summary (1995)
Lenny leads us into grungy nightclubs and scummy hotels, dealing with the pathetic needs of his customers. In a set-up scene in a club, he sells playback to a timid businessman, seductively explaining the technology ("This is not like TV, only better. This is like a piece of someone's life - straight from the cerebral cortex").
He lets him have a taste, and we see the mark's face as he turns soft and narcissistic; he thinks he's a teenage girl having a shower. Then Lenny points out a couple dancing on the other side of the room.
"How'd you like to be him? How'd you like to have a hot girlfriend like that? How'd you like to be her?" The movie is a technical tour de force. Director Kathryn Bigelow ("Blue Steel") and her designers and special-effects artists create the vision of a city spinning out of control. Cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti's point-of-view shots are virtuosic (especially one in which a character falls from a roof in an apparently uninterrupted take). The pacing is relentless, and the editing, by Howard Smith, creates an urgency and desperation.
Working from a screenplay by Jay Cocks and James Cameron (director of the "Terminator" films), Bigelow turns scenes like this into a critique of the central paradox of virtual reality: You cannot share someone else's reality without abandoning your own. As the "virgin brain" in the nightclub experiences the sample tape, he watches - and we watch him, defenseless and without inhibition.
It's creepy.
Other scenes go much further, exploring more twisted horrors. In one, which is disturbing and graphic, a man attacks a female victim after first forcing her to wear the headpiece - so that she experiences her own death through his eyes. It's revealing, how a scene like that seems so much more sad and distressing than the more graphic scenes of violence we see all the time in the movies: Bigelow is able to exploit the idea of what is happening; she forces her audience to deal with the screen reality, instead of allowing us to process it as routine "action." The plot is in the noir tradition, with updates out of recent headlines. Although Jeriko One's murder has pushed the city into anarchy, Lenny Nero's priorities are private. He wants to raise some money, maybe because that will increase his stature in Faith's eyes.
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