sysrick

Strange Days” does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary. Look for “tapehead,” “jacking in” and the movie’s spin on “playback” to appear in the vernacular. At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible. The police commissioner’s sudden appearance on the scene is miraculous. And Bigelow begins a riot and then forgets about it, segueing into a New Year’s Eve celebration as if you can turn off anarchy like water from a tap. What stays from the movie are not the transient plot problems, however, but the overall impact. 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. As the character Faith observes: “One of the ways movies are still better than playback - the music comes up, and you know it’s over.