When Strange Days hit theatres in 1995, nobody noticed. I guess we were already too busy partying like it was 1999. But for me, this was the one that felt like we were really pacing the edge of a new millennium.
It wasn’t another slick piece of cyberpunk futurism or jacked-in hacksploitation, this was a sweat-slicked amphetamine nightmare vision of the future shot like a 120-minute industrial music video. Given James Cameron’s involvement, The Terminator’s technophobia hovered above every scene – the movie had that same sense that history was grinding its gears toward some fixed, obliterating end.
Strange Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole tech-noir with an anxiety hangover. The camera’s practically snorting film stock. The movie was overlooked at the time, but on revisit, it’s a sharper take on the pre-millennium tension than most of its peers leading up to The Matrix.
The century was winding down, and director Kathryn Bigelow dropped a vision of a jaded culture running on caffeine fumes. This was absolutely perfect timing. By then, we all knew the future wasn’t going to be flying cars, jetpacks and silver jumpsuits, so we were bracing for darker times ahead. This future’s a pressure cooker. The tech’s invasive, the capitalism’s panoptical, the party’s endless, and no one’s at the wheel.
Turns out the actual future is even stranger than that. – Pop
Strange Days arrived on home video this week in 1996, after an October 13, 1995 theatrical release.