Strange Days (1995) on Netflix
Lenny Nero trades in illegal SQUID discs, recordings of another person's memories, in Los Angeles in 1999. A disc showing a woman's murder sends him and bodyguard Mace to trace it.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.2/1086,682 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Lenny Nero makes his living on the black market of Los Angeles in the closing days of 1999, trading illegal SQUID discs. Each disc carries what one person saw, heard and felt, and whoever wears the headset experiences it as their own. Lenny once worked vice for the LAPD; now he pines for Faith Justin, a singer who has moved on, and leans on Mace, a limousine driver and bodyguard who helps him despite her low opinion of his business. A prostitute named Iris, an old friend of Faith's, leaves a disc in Lenny's car. At a nightclub where Faith performs, an anonymous contact passes Lenny a second disc. When he plays it, he sees Iris raped and murdered. He and Mace want to know who recorded it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Strange Days (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Over 50 off-duty police officers were hired to control an assembled crowd of 10,000 people who each paid $10 in advance; a reported $750,000 was spent on the event, including renting half of the Bonaventure's 1,300 rooms, and five people were hospitalised for ecstasy overdoses.
- The film made $8 million in the United States and Canada, little more than a sixth of its $42 million production cost, and the failure almost derailed Kathryn Bigelow's career: five years passed before she directed The Weight of Water.
- The opening sequence features a 16-foot jump between two buildings by a stunt performer without a safety harness; it took two years to coordinate and has hidden cuts.
- The sequence where Iris runs in front of a speeding freight train was shot backwards, with the train actually backing up, and the footage was then reversed during editing.
- Ralph Fiennes was cast as Lenny days before his Schindler's List nomination for Best Supporting Actor was announced; Kathryn Bigelow said the part needed intelligence, complexity and depth only he could supply, while James Cameron had wanted a “glibber and slicker” actor.
- At the 22nd Saturn Awards, Angela Bassett won Best Actress and Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director award.
- The Hollywood Reporter announced that Bono was expected to join Fiennes and Bassett as Faith's love interest and manager Philo Gant, a role that would eventually be played by Michael Wincott.
- A line from the film, “Right here! Right now!”, was later sampled by Fatboy Slim for his single “Right Here, Right Now”.
