Pull on any list of Cyberpunk Ultimate films and you will find the matrix, the blade runner and the ghost in the shell. But there is a great film black tech which was released at the top of the Cyberpunk craze – then all but disappeared. It may be partly because of its title.
I wanted to see the strange days for a long time, but I continued to forget because, honestly, I did not remember what it was called. Then I finally rediscovered the science fiction thriller on Hulu. After my most recent visualization, I cannot stop thinking about it.
Although Strange Days released in 1995, it seems that it could have released yesterday. It is one of those rare old films that imagined the technology of virtual reality without transforming it into a gadget.
Strange Days took place in 1999 in Los Angeles in the last 48 hours of the millennium. Lenny Nero, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a former cop who now peddles an illegal virtual reality experience called Playback.
Nero’s friend and bodyguard, Mace (Angela Basset), tries to keep him rooted in reality and far from trouble. Together, they work to find a brutal rapist and a murderer – a man who uses VR reading records to record his crimes from his own point of view.
The film has not lost time to drop me off in its context of discrepancy: the opening scene is an armed robbery filmed from a first person perspective, the thief ranging from the cops and going from one roof to another. A few scenes later, I saw tanks in the streets of Los Angeles and I heard radio appeals declaring that the world would end at midnight on January 1, 2000.
Strange Days reminds me of the best episodes of Black Mirror – both deeply disturbing and uncomfortably near my home. Director Kathryn Bigelow was influenced by the 1992 riots and incorporated these elements of racial tension and police violence in her work. The result is a film that is sometimes difficult to watch but impossible to divert.
At the same time, Strange Days is anchored by emotion. Nero (Fiennes) spends a good part of the film reviving memories of her failed relationship with singer Faith (played by the actress who became a rocker Juliette Lewis). Lying in his bed while he plays images of happier days, he can be wrong to believe that he is patina again with faith – until the disc stops turning and opens his eyes, back in the solitary day.
“It is not” like television only “” explains Nero, because it introduces VR reading technology to one of its customers. “That’s life.”
But the character of Bassett, Mace, believes the opposite, at a given moment, confronted with Nero on his attachment to his “emotions used”.
“It’s your life!” said Mace. “Just here! Right now! It’s real, you hear me? In real time, it’s time to become real, no reading!”
While I was looking at strange days in 2025, I couldn’t help but think of the virtual reality devices that exist today. VR helmets like Meta Quest 3 and the next Google Glasses AR bring us closer to the film’s reading technology. And the immersive spatial videos of the Apple Vision Pro can give you the impression of really reliving a recorded memory in three dimensions. While I considered the similarities between our current technology and the reading records of Strange Days, I wondered if the future wanted to be haunted in the past.
Although he is 30 years old, the special effects of strange days are incredibly well resistant. Where other science fiction films from 1995 such as the Pirates and Johnny Mnemonic experienced with the first images generated by computer, Strange Days opted for a more practical approach: the characters entering and leaving reading images with a simple analog distortion effect, just as you would find by watching home videos on VHS Taps. The clichés from point of view have been carefully choreographed, and the resulting images seem to see it through the eyes of the recorder.
Strange Days also offers out -of -competition musical acts. Juliette Lewis, in character like Faith, releases two PJ Harvey tracks in screen performance that recalls the best of the 90s grunge. Rapper Jeriko One (played by Glenn Plummer) gives biting social comments in his video clip. And contemporary artists Aphex Twin, Deee-Lite and Skunk Anansie occur during the explosive final act of the film, a New Year’s rave in downtown Los Angeles. (It was a real concert with 10,000 participants.)
Strange Days is both an exciting action film and a pleated exploration of technology and memory. I am surprised that it was a box office flop in 1995, and I hope he received the recognition that she was deserving. However, I am glad that this science fiction masterpiece is available to disseminate today. Although Strange Days is not the easiest title to remember, the film itself is unforgettable.
