Strange Days (1995): Kathryn Bigelow's 90s Cyberpunk Vision of VR, Meta Glasses & Digital Memories
Strange Days (1995)
This week on Tech Film Noir, we're watching Strange Days (1995), Kathryn Bigelow's cyberpunk thriller, written by James Cameron, that imagined VR headsets, wearable recording technology and immersive first-person experiences decades before Meta Glasses became a reality.
Join Lianne Potter, Simon Painter and Jeff Watkins as they revisit one of the 90s' most ambitious science fiction films, exploring how Strange Days predicted wearable cameras, bodycam footage as "the only truth", memory streaming and our growing obsession with experiencing life through someone else's eyes.
Ralph Fiennes stars as Lenny Nero, an ex-cop turned black-market dealer of recorded memories, using the SQUID headset to sell other people's experiences. Think Meta Ray-Bans with a very illegal firmware update. Angela Bassett is, unsurprisingly, the coolest person in every room, while the film asks whether technology designed to bring us closer to reality actually leaves us more disconnected than ever.
Along the way we dive into Y2K paranoia, one of the best sci-fi soundtracks of the 90s, cyberpunk world-building, questionable predictions that thankfully never happened, and the ones that absolutely did. Nearly 30 years after its release, Strange Days feels less like forgotten science fiction and more like an instruction manual for the age of VR, wearable AI and smart glasses.
When movies guess the future, we check their work.
