CINEMA
Reviewed by: Derek Malcolm
FEW opening films at the London Film Festival have caused such consternation as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days. Yet, on the evidence of this futuristic epic (as well as Blue Steel and the highly successful Point Break), Bigelow is clearly one of the most proficient practitioners of pyrotechnical in-your-face film-making working today.
And Strange Days, set in an anarchic Los Angeles of 1999, where tensions on the streets have reached breaking point, at least has the distinction of possessing an apocalyptic vision that easily measures up to any of those put on the screen by James Cameron, who directed True Lies and the Terminator films. Cameron, Bigelow’s ex-husband, wrote Strange Days’ original story with Jay Cocks.
Sequence after sequence of the movie is orchestrated with such entirely cinematic passion and careless bravura that the essential banality of both script and concept is either lost on the viewer entirely or actually pointed up, depending upon one’s taste for what in some quarters has been called “techno-noir”. Strange Days is so blatant that you can only love it or hate it.The central figure, never quite lost in this garish landscape – thanks to a performance by Ralph Fiennes which suggests more than is actually in his lines – is Lenny Nero, a sleazy ex-cop who could be said to be fiddling while Rome burns.
Nero is making a good living hustling recordings made directly from people’s brains, which can then be accessed by others in search of sexual or other thrills via Squid (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device). It’s useful for married men who don’t want the bother of an affair, and for druggies who can’t afford the real buzz any more. His own private collection preserves the happier moments of a love affair with Juliette Lewis’s Faith, a scatty young singer.
The film paints a bleak, pessimistic picture of Los Angeles on the eve of the millenium which may well come to pass in one way or another. But its subtleties are almost entirely visual and crunched into the eyeballs rather as if we are wearing Squid too. That may partly be the purpose of the film, but it is an exceedingly wearing one and, in the end, without true resonance.It also contains the kind of violence that one doesn’t expect from Bigelow, if only because there seems so little purpose to it beyond the cheap thrills of a dystopian, genre-bending thriller. One might have been able to treat Strange Days more seriously were it not for its blatantly opportunistic ending and a length that causes even this frenetic kind of film-making to seem sagging and impotent.
The film foams at the mouth with ideas but ultimately delivers nothing but mammoth clichés culled from a hundred other movies. The orchestration of then, however, is often quite something.