Ex-cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is a street dealer of the newest illegal drug, human memory tapes. He’s also a user, escaping into his past when he was with punk rocker Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis). As society crumbles around him, he is given a tape of a psychotic killer raping and murdering an old friend and prostitute. Finding himself a target of both the killer, and the LAPD, Lenny, with the help of his only friends, limo driver Mace Mason (Angela Bassett) and brain damaged ex-cop Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore), has to discover what is behind the murder.
Cyberpunk has rarely been used to say more, and what it has to say in Strange Days isn’t very nice. People are vicious, death is random, and the only ones you can trust less than the criminals in the streets are those who are supposed to be protecting you. Inspired by the L.A. riots, Strange Days has a world of racist, stupid police, rap stars as revolutionaries (too bad they know more about gold and prostitutes than about how to make a fair society), crime, and meaningless death. I wish I could say this world wasn’t familiar. The villain (the villain? No, make that one of the many, many villains; it’s heroes that are hard to find.) states the world view late in the film: It’s all falling apart and none of it means anything; you could get murdered at any moment for no good reason. His answer is to take all he can while he can. Mace’s is to do the right thing and take care of those you love. Lenny doesn’t have an answer; he’s a mess.
Written by James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss), along with reviewer Jay Cocks, Strange Days has Cameron’s fingerprints all over it. It’s long, detailed, character driven, action-packed, and oddly hopeful. Much of that is packed into the characters of Lenny and Mace. Lenny, played to perfection by Fiennes, is a complicated guy, heroic at times but also cowardly. He uses his friends without a thought but does care for them as well. He’s an addict, knows it, and accepts it. I can’t recall a more complete human being in any film. His old love for Faith is the catalyst for much of the films action, but it is his relationship with Mace that keeps it going. Mace, like Van Helsing in the early Dracula films, is the voice of morality and proper action, and as such, has some uninteresting speeches. Being told how to behave is not fascinating. However, in the films most emotional scene, Mace remembers what Lenny was, and how he looked after her child at a crucial moment. Sure, Strange Days will say that love is the answer, but it’s not an easy or simple answer. And it only does so much as the world is a pretty dark place.
There’s a few missteps (like a dog attacking at just the perfect time to save our heroes, Lenny not thinking to copy an important tape, and a crowd which switches from deafeningly noisy, to quiet, to full riot, to peaceful, with supernatural speed) but they take little away from director Kathryn Bigelow’s thinking-person’s masterpiece.
My only complaint was a disregard for the real world. In 1995, it was obvious that the technology of the SQUID, a device that records and plays back memories, was not going to exist in 1999. The change of the millennium is not essential to the story; an unspecified future would have worked better and been less distracting to the audience in the long run.