It is not common for me to suddenly discover a cool scifi movie that I haven't watched. But this is exactly what happened a few days ago when I saw an image on Twitter with a bunch of scifi movie and I was able to recognize every single one except Strange Days. I researched this movie for a few minutes and decided it was good enough to give it a watch.
The 90s was an excellent decade for movies about different types of simulated reality, Matrix is clearly the most popular one but there were other great ones such as The Thirteenth Floor and Dark City (very similar to the first Matrix movie). Strange Days, on the other hand, explores a different type of future technology but one that could, in a way, affect the person's perception of reality.
If you have watched some Black Mirror episodes like for example The Entire History of You, or Crocodile then you will be a little bit familiar with this type of technology, although it is not exactly the same as what we see in those episodes. In this fictional world, this technology has found its way to the black market and there are a lot of people doing clandestine business with it. In the picture below you can see the type of device that is used.
Our main character is a guy who participates in these shady businesses but he also takes a kind of moral stand. I mean, he doesn't deal with extremely shocking content such as snuff, or anything that is really brutal. He is a very talkative and eloquent person which is necessary for him to find clients but inevitably, he will end up in the middle of a conspiracy and the only way to solve it is to use the technology he makes business with.
I didn't like the type of characters in this film, apart from the main one and a limousine female driver who by the way was a great fighter, the other characters were all poorly designed. Especially those that worked in the music industry. I also didn't like the fact there were 2 scenes where the only thing that happened was a female character singing some boring song and looking all ugly. Despite these shortcomings, I think this was a good scifi movie but it could have been much better.
If your favorite genre is scifi, and have an interest in technology that influences the brain, then you will probably enjoy this film. If not, then this movie might not be entertaining enough for you to enjoy. Besides, there are more recent productions exploring a similar topic that are of higher quality.
The best
- Intriguing futuristic technology, but there are better productions from more recent years (The Black Mirror episodes I mentioned).
- Good performance by the lead actor.
The worst
- Too long of a movie for such a normal scifi story. Too much time is wasted in unnecessary scenes with the music people.
- I felt it had some wasted potential because the scifi topic was cool enough but the end result was underwhelming.
More information: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/281-strange-days
Review: AA
In numbers: 6.5/10