31 Years Later, A Forgotten Cyberpunk Classic Just Got A Long-Overdue Upgrade
Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wire-tripped?
Before the days of her Academy Award-winning wartime true stories and her pivot to historical and political thrillers, Kathryn Bigelow got her start making textured genre films that have become cult classics. Her first film, The Loveless, was a volatile drama about a biker gang that helped bring Willem Dafoe to prominence, but her second movie, Near Dark, was what really put her on the map – a Gothic horror Western mashup about a family of nomadic vampires in small-town Oklahoma. Of course, one can’t talk about early Kathryn Bigelow without talking about what is debatably her most lasting impact, the homoerotic extreme-sports thrills of cult-classic heist movie Point Break.
Four years after the release of Point Break, Bigelow released a film that flopped so hard it almost ended her career, and ironically enough, it was co-written by James Cameron, fresh off the success of T2: Judgement Day as well as the couple’s recent divorce. Strange Days, a 1995 cyberpunk neo-noir set at the turn of the new millennium, grossed only $17 million on a budget of $42 million. Critics at the time were flummoxed by the high-concept convolution of its story and Bigelow’s unflinching depiction of horrors inflicted against women. In the 31 years since its release, however, it has gone on to amass a dedicated cult following who have championed it as a prophetic and incisive piece of political commentary – and after several years of physical media inaccessibility and dodgy availability on streaming, it has now landed on Disney+ and Hulu in its correct aspect ratio.
Strange Days has languished for decades without a proper modern home release in North America or permanent residence on streaming for a number of reasons, including the film’s poor initial performance, the complexity of rights ownership, and the film’s 90s time-capsule soundtrack. And even on the rare occasion when it does pop up on digital platforms (like HBO Max a few years ago) it's usually only presented in a cropped 16:9 aspect ratio, which severely compromises the claustrophobic, paranoid camerawork. Luckily, the new streaming version preserves the original widescreen Scope format of 2:39:1, which means longtime fans and new viewers can see Bigelow’s underrated classic the way it was intended.
Although James Cameron began developing the film’s story back in 1985, with Bigelow always intended to direct, the script wasn’t completed until 1992, the same year that the acquittal of four police officers charged in the Rodney King police brutality case sparked the L.A. riots. That sense of political injustice and social outrage permeates the film, which takes place in a world where high-tech headpieces called SQUIDs allow people to record their memories and sensory experiences onto discs. A former cop turned black market dealer of SQUID recordings named Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) stumbles onto evidence of a murder that pulls him and limousine driver Mace (Angela Bassett) into a far-reaching criminal conspiracy that threatens to destabilize the tenuous social order of 1999 Los Angeles.
In a star-studded cast, Angela Bassett and her biceps steal the show.
The film is a time capsule of the racial injustices and class disparity of the 1990s, and those ideas are still relevant today, but it’s also aged extremely well due to the central technology in the movie rippling out into how modern viewers engage with the internet now. The rise of lifestyle streamers and smart glasses makes the concept of the SQUID feel less like speculative fiction and more like the subject of a documentary, and there’s a massive appetite online for people to live vicariously through the recorded experiences of others. In just a little over three decades, Strange Days has gone from being a commercial failure to a celebrated and disturbing reflection of the real world, and now it’s finally accessible to watch for anyone who wants to see just how accurately Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, and co-writer Jay Cocks predicted the future.
