STRANGE DAYS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Never have I had a film drop in
rating so far so fast. This is a movie with an
enthralling first half hour. It offers a
fascinating look at society falling apart and
technological change that would really transform
humanity. But this is a lead-in for a gawd-awful,
predictable, cliched murder mystery that almost
never uses the premise. Rating: -1 (-4 to +4).
The best science fiction film of the 1980s was the first 2/3 of the film BRAINSTORM. This was an excellent look at how one invention could transform humanity. The invention was the means to record a person's thoughts and sensory input and to play it back for someone else so the second person has exactly the same experience. The last third of BRAINSTORM shows the signs of rapid rewriting of the script after one of the major actors died. In the world of the film resulting transformation of society could have been the subject of twenty excellent sequels without ever covering the same topic twice. For a while watching STRANGE DAYS I thought I was seeing the first of those sequels and it was great. But the feeling just did not last.
Lenny Nero (played by Ralph Fiennes) traffics in contraband experience, recorded on little CD-ROMs and capable of being played back. If you want the experience of making love to a beautiful woman or of committing a violent crime, you can buy it from Lenny and play it back as often as you like, repeating it over and over. If you have no legs and miss the experience of running on the beach, as long as some human can have the experience, you can also. As Lenny says, "This isn't 'television, only better'" This is the real thing. The only problem is the technology and materials are illegal. People record their experiences and sell them to Lenny who sells them to other people. Lenny has a bag full of contraband experiences (not unlike the handkerchief full of souls in "The Devil and Daniel Webster"). He plies his trade in the netherworld of a disintegrating Los Angeles. So what do writers James Cameron and Jay Cocks do with the idea? One of these little experience CD-ROMs has a recording of an experience that some people would like hushed up and others would want to make public. Full stop on the ideas. Now we have high-energy chases, sex scenes, martial arts fights, gunplay, shocking revelations, rock music performances, smashing windshields, graphic rapes, betrayals, murders, cover-ups, and a totally daffy ending with several progressively sillier climaxes. Not surprisingly Los Angeles is much like today, only worse, in the last days of the second-to-last year of this century. (Yes, the second-to-last. Cameron and Cox seem to think that in spite of the fact that the first millennium started with the year 1 and the second one started with the year 1001, for some reason we will start the third one in the year 2000. We won't.)
Ralph Fiennes and Tom Sizemore are fairly good as low-life heroes, and what is cyberpunk without its low-life heroes? Angela Bassett is not quite up to a role that calls for her to have both the natural wisdom of a Solomon and the martial arts skills of a Chuck Norris. It isn't her fault, but the script falls just short of implying she can walk on water. Juliette Lewis show more flesh than acting talent as an old girlfriend of Lenny's.
The style of the film is fast-paced and will certainly be hard for some audiences to follow, at least in the earlier, more interesting parts of the film. The editing is fast, but not always skillful. Occasionally it borders on the confusing, but this is supposed to be a bewildering future. Katheryn Bigelow directs it with some of the same style she used in TV's WILD PALMS. That film was three hours and seemed longer; this one is nearly two-and-a-half hours and seems just as long.
This is a film that builds something intriguing and interesting and then spoils it all in the last hour and fifty minutes. The real problem is that STRANGE DAYS tries to be an action film, a martial arts film, a film about race, and a science fiction film while using a plot that with minor substitutions would be a cable-bait mystery. I wonder if the nearness of the time-setting of this film will get 20th Century Fox thinking about the fact they soon need a new name for their studio. Then again, with disappointments like this one, maybe they won't. In spite of a great start, this one gets a high -1 on the -4 to +4 scale. At one point I thought it might get a +3.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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