'Strange Days' Turns 20: Remembering Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron's Fascinating Sci-Fi Flop

Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett in ‘Strange Days’ (Everett)

By Oliver Lyttelton

These days, Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron are two of the most famous filmmakers around. She was the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar, for The Hurt Locker in 2010, and had another hit with 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty. He’s the writer and director of billion-dollar blockbusters Titanic and Avatar. Many fans are likely aware that these two titans were once married, between 1989 and 1991. But fewer probably remember their only big-screen collaboration, Strange Days, a flop sci-fi thriller released 20 years ago this month. Mostly ignored at the time, its vision of the near future has proved strangely prescient in the decades since, and it stands as — if not quite a lost classic — then a deeply fascinating failure.

A noirish, end-of-the-millennium thriller, Strange Days was directed by Bigelow and produced by Cameron, who also wrote the movie’s story and shares screenplay credit. Cameron previously said that he initially came up with the concept for the film in 1986, after the huge of success of Aliens. He showed his soon-to-be-ex-wife a 90-page treatment that he’d written in 1991, after Bigelow had her own commercial breakthrough with the heist thriller Point Break. “It was practically a novel, but it was unwieldy,” he told Omni Magazine later of his story about a black market tech dealer who gets embroiled in a murder mystery. “It was so Byzantine and had so much in it.” The two brought in Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence) to work on the screenplay, and shooting got underway with Bigelow at the helm late in 1994.

Set in Los Angeles in the then-very-near future of 1999, in the last few days before the New Year, Bigelow’s film imagines a technology called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that enables a wearer to record his or her memories and the sensations experienced for later playback. Developed for law enforcement use, it’s since been declared illegal and is now the provenance of black-market dealers who peddle things like sex clips and snuff films. One of those dealers is the movie’s protagonist, a flamboyantly dressed ex cop named Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes, in his first role after acclaimed turns in Schindler’s List and Quiz Show).

When Lenny isn’t selling bootleg clips, he’s endlessly replaying SQUID footage of happier times with his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a musician who left him for a record industry exec (Michael Wincott). Bigelow shoots all the SQUID sequences — like Lenny’s intimate interlude with Faith, or later, the murder of another character — in a vivid, disturbing first-person reminiscent of video games like Doom, which had debuted only two years earlier. The director later explained in an interview that she was interested in exploring how “the desire to escape through watching, to cross over, can be insidious, and comes with its own price.”

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The movie’s version of L.A. is a pressure cooker that gets infinitely hotter after the death of rap star and civil-rights activist Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), which was recorded on a SQUID deck by a prostitute Lenny knows. The clip proves that the murder was committed by two corrupt cops (Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner). With the help of badass bodyguard Mace (Angela Bassett) and private investigator best friend Max (Tom Sizemore), Lenny has to untangle the conspiracy and stop the city from melting down before the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31.

Strange Days was released wide in October 1995 to wildly mixed reviews — Roger Ebert called it “a technical tour-de-force,” but the Los Angeles Times countered that “no matter how much thought may have gone into Strange Days, terribly little has come out the other end.” The box office was awful: The film eventually took in just $8 million in the U.S. and was out of theaters swiftly, seemingly destined to be forgotten.

Juliette Lewis (Everett)

And to be fair, as one of the first movies to tap into anxiety about the approaching end of the millennium, it hasn’t aged well in many respects. The Y2K-flavored jitters can’t help but feel dated now. And between the use of MiniDiscs as storage for the SQUID devices, the presence of now-faded actors like Sizemore and Wincott, the mid ’90s-tastic soundtrack — including an onscreen appearance by Skunk Anansie — the film definitely has a musty time capsule feel.

And yet in other respects, the disturbing vision of the future that Strange Days presents can seem oddly familiar in 2015. Much of that has to do with the SQUID technology. It’s obviously not been directly replicated, but we’re certainly moving closer, with virtual-reality technology like Oculus Rift finally approaching the mainstream and Periscope allowing anyone to live-stream their every move through their phones.

The darker uses of the technology are echoed today too: When killer Bryce Williams posted horrifying first-person video of his shooting of television reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on social networks in August, it was hard to shake the parallels with Bigelow’s movie. The more disturbing themes have been reflected in pop culture too, whether it’s the countless found-footage horror movies from The Blair Witch Project to V/H/S or a recent episode of acclaimed sci-fi TV drama Black Mirror, which used the same conceit as Strange Days.

Fiennes and Tom Sizemore (Everett)

Even Bigelow’s vision of a dystopian L.A. proved somewhat prophetic. Her depiction of an end-of-the-empire city on a racially charged knife’s edge after police shootings was partially inspired by the 1992 L.A. riots sparked by the acquittal of the four officers tried for the Rodney King beating. But the scenes are eerily reminiscent of news footage from recent events in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. “The politics were very important,” Bigelow said in a 1995 interview. “The landscape of a society, a flash-point society maybe on the brink of civil war, the tensions that were permeating every crevice. It’s not an incredible stretch of the imagination. Anybody who was in L.A at the time of the riots will acknowledge that.”

Strange Days is far from perfect. For every inspired piece of casting (Bassett is terrific, and Fiennes makes a surprisingly effective and sexy action hero), there’s an odd one like Juliette Lewis, who struggles with an underwritten role. The plot is messy and doesn’t satisfy by the end, in part because the secret evil mastermind is exactly who you’d imagine from looking at the cast list. And the movie’s take on youth and hip-hop culture never persuades, for all its good intentions.

Yet the film has a fire under it that propels it and turns it into more than the sum of its parts. It was ahead of its time, so much so that perhaps it’s only now, two decades on, that its themes have really blossomed. Bigelow’s comments about our uneasy, voyeuristic relationship with sex and violence are much clearer in 2015, when we’re all constantly refreshing Twitter, watching YouTube, playing online games, and checking our iPhones. Strange Days was warning us about living our lives dominated by a technology that’s not going to save us. SQUID might not exist (yet). But the film’s future, where we’re all switched on all the time, certainly does.