Katherine Bigelow’s name is synonymous with serious, political cinema. Movies like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, in which the director takes modern American history and shapes it, uniting gripping entertainment with complex and thorny morals. Her next film, this month’s House of Dynamite, appears to be more of the same: a pulse-pounding exploration of how the U.S. government would respond if another country fired a nuclear missile towards the American heartland.
But that wasn’t always Bigelow’s established style. Throughout the 1980s and into the early ‘90s, she made a name for herself with fun, frivolous genre flicks. Then, 30 years ago, the Point Break director released a movie that set her career on a new trajectory — and almost derailed it completely in the process.
Released on Oct. 13, 1995, Strange Days takes place in what was then the not-so-distant future of 1999; specifically, the few days leading up to New Year’s Eve and the turn of the millennium. James Cameron penned the script for his by-then ex-wife (he was married to Bigelow from 1989-1991), harnessing a fear of the future he’d honed in the Terminator films. Strange Days is a noir-soaked science-fiction thriller set against a backdrop of racial tension, police brutality, sexual assault, and a disruptive new virtual reality device called a SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device).
Ralph Fiennes stars as Lenny, an ex-cop turned black market smuggler who makes a living buying and selling memories that can be experienced in VR. The SQUID, which looks a bit like one of those scalp massagers, but with more wires, allows the wearer to record their own lives onto compact minidiscs. In the opening scene, we experience one of these recorded memories, presented in POV and ending with the violent death of the uploader, which Lenny seems to delight in.
Lenny soon becomes embroiled in a larger conspiracy after he winds up watching another memory that reveals the murder of a prostitute named Iris (Brigitte Bako). As he follows additional clues, with help from bodyguard/limo driver Lornette (Angela Bassett), he discovers an even bigger cover-up that could ignite Los Angeles into a full-blown race riot.
Inspired in part by the Rodney King riots of 1992, Cameron does an impressive job of tackling racial and political issues head-on (if Avatar’s environmental parable feels too soft, watch Strange Days). However, while the pieces of a great movie are there, they never come together to feel like a complete film. It’s messy in ways that are both good and bad — fun to watch, but hard to follow; exciting action, but ill-defined characters. Just head over to the Wikipedia page and take a look at its breathless synopsis for a sense of how quickly and erratically Strange Days zigs and zags from one revelation to the next.
If you know what you’re getting yourself into, Strange Days is an extremely entertaining watch. The world Bigelow and Cameron imagine leaps just far enough into an alternate future to seem alien without needing to rely on elaborate metaphors to reflect our own world back at us. The setting could be described as a grimier, grittier Blade Runner (and without the flying cars or robots). It’s cyberpunk without even the slightest shred of utopian optimism.
Unfortunately, audiences at the time had no idea what they were getting themselves into, and rejected Strange Days wholeheartedly. The film grossed just $17 million on a $42 million budget. What could have been Bigelow’s breakout moment, pushing her out of pure genre filmmaking and into quasi-serious cinema, instead landed her in director jail.
Strange Days set Bigelow back, and she spent the early 2000s trying and mostly failing to dig her way out of the muck with subpar thrillers. The trajectory of her career changed again with The Hurt Locker (2008), a more serious war story that won her an Oscar for directing. It also marked the beginning of her collaboration with Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker and her next two films, Zero Dark Thirty (about the effort to kill Osama Bin Laden) and Detroit (about a real-life racially charged riot in the 1960s that led to three civilian deaths). She didn’t write her new film, House of Dynamite, either (that one was Jackie screenwriter Noah Oppenheim)
If Strange Days marked the beginning of her rise into more serious cinema (even if it was a false start), mixing pulpy genre with heavier themes like racism and sexual assault, then House of Dynamite may represent the beginning of a shift back towards simpler blockbuster entertainment. The new film is dressed up in the sort of complex serious political realities that Bigelow has trafficked in for most of the 21st Century, but at its heart, it’s a messy popcorn thriller, just like Strange Days.
