Strange Days: Kathryn Bigelow

It's never a good sign when you find yourself wondering "just how much longer is this damn movie anyhow?" And it's an even worse sign when the answer is "at least another hour." Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days is a punishingly long film that squanders some fantastic ideas concerning the nature of reality and the human experience. Here's the idea: there are machines known as SQUID's, or "Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices," that can literally record a person's experiences, their emotions, their physical sensations, etc, etc. These recordings can then be played back like virtual reality DVD's, allowing an average joe on the street to experience things like being a different gender, running a marathon...or raping and killing somebody. Here's the plot: a former LAPD officer named Lenny Nero who markets illegal SQUID recordings comes into possession of a "blackjack," or a snuff recording. Even worse, the woman being attacked was a friend of his. So Nero gets pulled into a world of deadly intrigue that includes powerful music producers, corrupt cops, and the murder of an infamous black rapper named Jeriko One. And, yes, the film's production values are staggering. The SQUID scenes are done via POV tracking shots that must have required herculean efforts to block, rehearse, and properly execute. The streets of Los Angeles are effectively transformed into anarchic nightmares where armored policemen and tanks patrol even the safest neighborhoods. And the final scenes that involve a city-wide rave-turned-riot are magnificent to behold. But the film has two major problems. First, the screenplay is a mess. Blunt force exposition is spewed at the drop of a hat. My "favorite" example is near the end when Nero almost literally asks the antagonist to explain his master plan while being held at gunpoint. And the antagonist agrees! After all, and I quote, he "won't tell anybody." What is this, a Silver Age comic book? But the worst piece of writing in the entire film takes place in an early love scene where Lenny's girlfriend Faith loving stares at him in post-coital bliss. She says, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, "I love your eyes. I love how they see things." George Lucas would have demanded a re-write of that scene. The second problem in the film is that the characters are either stupid, annoying, or so badly characterized that they break the flow of the film. Take Faith, for example. Played by Juliette Lewis, Faith has two modes of expressing herself: shrill, over-dramatic shrieking and lifeless deadpan. She also alternatively helps and betrays Nero throughout the film. However, her heel turns are so abrupt and illogical that they make it seem like her scenes were edited into the final cut in the wrong order. Strange Days is an intriguing failure of a film that doesn't deserve its fantastic concepts.

5/10