Strange Days

This is the first movie about virtual reality to deal in a challenging way with the implications of the technology. It's fascinating the way Bigelow is able to suggest so much of VR's impact (and dangers) within a movie - a form of VR that's a century old. Read full review

Undeniably thrilling and troubling...Dazzling, era-defining. Read full review

Bigelow's knack for fast-paced action, her skill at evoking a threatening atmosphere and her affinity with damaged people all come together in the daringly kinetic new film. [13 Oct 1995, p.28]

Fascinating. Read full review

Flawed, but often brilliant, provocative film-making. Read full review

Strange Days is a thriller first and a mystery second. It's big, explosive entertainment and, although not directed by Cameron, is very much in the vein we've come to expect from him. Strange Days may not be the best movie to hit screens during the Fall, but it's likely to be the brashest. Read full review

Bigelow's walk on the wired side isn't perfect, but she certainly grabs us by our voyeurism and yanks us into the head trip of the year. "Strange Days" is more than wired - it's loaded. [13 Oct 1995, p.37]

Finally, in Strange Days, written by ex-husband James Cameron and Jay Cocks, she has a script that is worthy of her intense and intensely personal visual style. The result is a mind-blowing visionary thriller set on the last day of the 20th century in smoldering Los Angeles, a kind of "Blade Runner" for the millennium. [13 Oct 1995, p.3E]

Everything in the movie is excessive, and if you have no taste for flamboyant or violent genre pieces, you may find much of it--and especially the amazingly protracted climax--a little ridiculous. But what's fascinating about "Strange Days" is both its sheer kinetic energy, the vitality of the actors and the density and detail of its crazy little world. [13 Oct 1995, p.C2]

From the visceral plunges of the first person mind clip sequences (including a terrifying, controversy courting rape sequence) to the overwhelming finale this is a, literally, stunning event. Some directors can, thank God, still make you experience films. Read full review

A technical tour de force for director Kathryn Bigelow and her team, pic is less accomplished in putting over its characters, emotions and dubious sociopolitical agenda. Read full review

Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small. Read full review

I wasn't bored at all by this, and Angela Bassett's action-hero charisma often blew me away, but fans of Bigelow at her best (e.g., Near Dark) may be put off by the movie's calculation, which doesn't always fit with its intellectual pretensions. Read full review

If anything, Strange Days belongs to the rotters hovering around its edges: Michael Wincott, a vision of Drano-throated malevolence; Tom Sizemore, who, as Lenny’s bikerish pal, suggests Judd Nelson if he’d let the corruption ooze a little further out of his pores; and the wonderfully weaselly Richard Edson as an underground software techie. Read full review

Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they're offset by frequent distractions: Lewis' standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going. Read full review

Strange Days - on and off screen - should be a lesson to filmmakers not to use virulent, touchy subjects for entertainment shortcuts. Bigelow has created a state-of-the-art movie machine, with all the moral and political complexity of an Etch-a-Sketch. [13 Oct 1995, p.10]

Strange Days is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to assemble the latest in fringe-culture byproducts - distortion-laden torch songs, millenarian fantasies and cyberpunk nightmares - into a Hollywood package. Its failures are those of limited imagination; its brands of strangeness, like the clips its characters replay, never stray far from the familiar landscapes of 1995 pop culture. Read full review

Strange Days presents itself as an original vision, yet many of its ideas about the perils of virtual reality were more intriguingly explored in several early-1980s thrillers, among them David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and Douglas Trumbull's "Brainstorm." [13 Oct 1995, p.F1]

Not for a moment did I believe any of these characters. They were not as provocative as the clips Fiennes was selling, and, in a strange way, "Strange Days" is undone by the very product it condemns. [13 Oct 1995, p.B]

It wallows queasily in its high-tech violence and is woefully anti-climactic; if you think director Kathryn Bigelow doesn't know when to quit, just think back to her sky-diving folly Point Break. The audio-visual ka-boom here befits James Cameron's producing-writing co-credits, but little else justifies Days' prime Saturday-Sunday slot in the New York Film Festival. [6 Oct 1995, p.4D]

For about an hour the writing, acting and direction coalesce in a prismatic, hyperkinetic ode to end-of-century doom. And then the two-hours-plus film starts to subside into genre convention. [16 Oct 1995, p.86]

It hurts to see this story reach for a tidy ending... STRANGE DAYS hurtles down the track for two hours, frantically trying to warn us en route to the Big Switchback, only to pull up in a hiss of smoke and hot air. Read full review

Strange Days wants to say something about faith and redemption -- about the importance of maintaining one's humanity in a darkened world. That's a worthy intent, but Bigelow is so enamored of high-tech thrills, and so mesmerized by the violence she seeks to condemn, that her efforts at 11th-hour moralizing seem limp and halfhearted. Read full review

For 2 1/2 hours, Strange Days swirls and blooms its way into your head, sounds and colors popping like fireworks, a stream of ideas flowing steadily beneath the dazzle. It's a light show for the mind, a kaleidoscope of exhilarating action, social commentary and post-modern science fiction -- yet when it's all over, you can't help but think, "Is that it?" [13 Oct 1995, p.5G]

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

A film that's prescient and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived in roughly equal measures...Strange Days is the cinematic equivalent of trip-hop, a shadowy realm of atmosphere, mood and suggestion with a decidedly drugged-up, post-apocalyptic feel. But the many things Strange Days gets right are negated by the things it gets wrong. Read full review

Days is loaded with effective visual razzmatazz, but what the eyes giveth, the ears taketh away. For whether it's the plot, the dialogue, the character development or the acting itself, anything that stands apart from camera style is a thudding disappointment. Read full review

One imagines that Bigelow's story conferences with ex-husband Cameron (maker of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "True Lies") and Cocks were free of such apparently anti-entertainment concepts as "character development," "predictability" and "believability." [13 Oct 1995, p.N44]

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

The movie is shot as if Bigelow wanted to take her audience to the very edge of sensory overload. Her pulsing, super-psychedelic images are edgy and invasive. They burn as they hit your retina. After a while, however, Bigelow's careening camera, the heavy-metal music and the flash cutting begin to make you feel hammered and abused. Though the movie is jammed with plot, nothing seems to happen. [13 Oct 1995, p.F01]