Wow. I’m going to try and describe how good the movie Strange Days is.
The movie takes place in 1999 right before the new year and thus the new millenium. The movie was made in 1995, so this was still the future. In this future, there are machines that can record the brain states of its wearer, and so people live out fantasies by playing the tapes that were recorded from someone else’s brain. People puts on the mesh helmet, and enter into the viewpoint of another person.
Of course their is a vibrant trade in exotic movies of this type, and the metaphorical connection to the illegal drug trade is present in every scene. The main character is a dealer of these illegal experiences, and after giving a prospective client a taste of one of these memories, he says “and that was just an 18 year old girl taking a shower.”
The great part about this movie is that on its most basic level, it’s just a great thriller. Someone got killed and the main character needs to figure out why and who did it. Just following this basic level of the story is immensely rewarding, and like any good thriller, a brutal murder becomes so much more.
What really makes this movie genius though is that every scene advances at least three other stories simultaneously.
First, there is the MLK like rapper who is murdered, which introduces an element of racial struggle to the movie. Indeed in the end when the main character and his black friend express their love for each other, its all the more meaningful for being interracial.
Also, there is an ongoing point about history and dystopian futures. The movie takes place, as I said, at the turn of the millennium, and each character has a unique spin on what this means. Some people see the millennium as a massive celebration that will burn out of control and break the fragile hold of the police state run by the LAPD. Others who are more optimistic see history as beginning with the millennium. To these people, totalitarianism will be erased by a new era. The final sequences of the movie happen right at the pivot point between two eras and it gives substances to the otherwise trivial point that history can be made in an instant. (All this is even more interesting if you know about our own government’s successful attempts to avert several terrorist attacks planned for the millennium).
Still further, there are many philosophical points. There is talk about mankind’s willingness to buy and sell memories and how this fact marks the end of human creativity and uniqueness. The LA of the future merely recycles its memories again and again, reliving them without being able to create new ones. This mirrors the main character who remains obsessed with a girlfriend who has left him for someone else. The typical love story cliches are made fresh by the fact that the main character, the one who cannot find new love, is an experience junky like everyone else. He just pathetically replays tapes of the time he spent with his ex. The entire society in fact is trapped in its own mediocrity and the millennium is the point where newness can once again enter into the society. The emphasis on creativity and history is all very Nietzschean.
Finally, there is a point about perception and cinematography. When a character plays someone else’s experience, the camera jitters and swerves to mirror the first person perspective, and if you’ve read any of my other recent posts, you know this is an interesting topic in its own right.
All told, this movie is a gritty, futuristic, dystopian, matrix-like, murder mystery, with some surprising plot twists and a completely unorthodox endgame. So much is happening at once and every second is a rich intersection between all these themes.
If you have netflix, you should move this to the front of your queue right now. It…is…awesome.
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