Blade Runner 2049

When Blade Runner was released in 1982, it was savaged by critics and failed to make back its budget. Over the years, however, its reputation grew, as did its influence. The look of the film’s dark, dystopian futureworld could be seen in films (The Matrix) and video games (Deus Ex) as well as the Cyberpunk movement thereafter (author William Gibson famously left a screening midway through for fear it would influence his novel Neuromancer). Despite its influence, no one was really clamoring for a sequel – certainly not the studio nor the filmmakers who ended the film on a deliciously ambiguous note that didn’t really need to be explained.

“This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old blade runner, I need your magic.” – Bryant

It is 2017 and here we are with Blade Runner 2049, a sequel co-written by returning screenwriter Hampton Fancher and Harrison Ford reprising his role as the titular character. However, Ridley Scott chose not to return to direct (too busy driving the Alien franchise into the ground), handing over directing duties to Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve (Arrival). Does this new film have anything of interest to say or does it fall into the same trap that doomed Tron: Legacy (2010) – all style with little substance?

Thirty years have passed since the first film and the world has only gotten worse. The Tyrell Corporation is no more – bankrupt and bought out by wealthy industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who has created a new generation of replicants that are much more subservient. Blade runners still exist but now with the sole purpose of finding and “retiring” older generation replicants – a sly commentary on the generation gap that exists between older models being made redundant by the newer ones.

We meet Detective K (Ryan Gosling) doing his job – hunting down a Nexus 8 replicant (Dave Bautista). At the crime scene, the detective finds the remains of a Nexus 7 replicant that was pregnant and had a child – an impossibility! He’s ordered to erase all knowledge of it – but of course he doesn’t. K investigates the identity of the mysterious replicant – this leads him to a startling reveal that links this new film with the original. Intrigued, he digs deeper and uncovers the dead replicant’s link to retired blade runner Rick Deckard (Ford), who he seeks out.

Unfortunately, Wallace learns of this and orders his right-hand woman Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) – a ruthless new generation replicant – to find the child so that he can study it and figure out what Tyrell was able to achieve that has eluded him. He’s the film’s morally sordid puppet master with grand designs for the future – a warped reality where he is revered as a deity.

K is himself a replicant, which presents intriguing, fascinating implications that the film touches upon throughout, like how he is resented by his fellow (human) cops as well as his neighbors; old prejudices don’t go away over time. Ryan Gosling is first-rate as a replicant used to doing what he’s told and learning, or rather feeling compelled to disobey by what he discovers about the Nexus 7 replicant. The actor maintains an emotionless façade of a machine that knows what’s expected of him and does it without question, but over the course of the film he undergoes a journey of self-discovery, delivering an inquisitive, thoughtful performance.

K’s girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) is a hologram, which seems rather fitting for a replicant. Their relationship is a fascinating one that is explored throughout the film. For example, the greatest gift he can give her is an upgrade that allows her to actually feel the rain outside – a basic sensation that we take for granted.

Blade Runner 2049 explores the notion of illusion vs. reality. Joi is a hologram that longs to experience reality. Later on, K questions his memories – are they implants or are they real? What constitutes real memories and how do we know they are authentic?

Los Angeles hasn’t gotten any better. If anything it’s worse – denser in population and the weather is more extreme, alternating between oppressive rain and snow. This new film maintains the original’s lived-in look and incredible attention to detail. In sharp contrast is Las Vegas, which resembles a mausoleum of a bygone era – an irradiated ghost town, frozen in time. In fact, the film is populated by holograms with “ghosts” from the present – Joi – and ones from the past – Elvis and Sinatra’s holograms, ghosts of spirits long gone.

Like Blade Runner, BR2049 features richly textured cinematography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, which is a marvel to behold. His past collaborations with Villeneuve (Sicario) have been excellent and this new one goes above and beyond by creating a fully immersive experience with evocative sights and sounds of a decaying world. Take Wallace’s inner sanctum: an astounding example of set direction – courtesy of Dennis Gassner – a tranquil, water-themed room that has to be seen to be believed. They take the world that Ridley Scott and company created in Blade Runner, build and expand on it, making it their own while it still feels like this is the same universe.

I like that Villeneuve lets the story breathe, taking his time with deliberate pacing for certain scenes. He lets us soak in the mood and atmosphere while also having the characters talk to each other for extended periods of time, much like in the original film. He also spends time developing Gosling’s K so that over the running time it feels like we’ve been on a journey with him. This is such a rarity for a big budget genre film, but at this point in his career Villeneuve has earned it.

Blade Runner 2049 is a rare contemporary science fiction film that is actually about something, instead of using CGI to gloss over a weak script. The film delves deeper into the notion of replicants used as slave labor, from Wallace creating his own army of replicant slaves, to the underground army that wants to be free. This was touched on to some degree in Blade Runner but is explored in more detail here.

“It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?” – Gaff

Villeneuve hasn’t merely made a film that is slavishly faithful to the original. He certainly pays tribute to it with a few visual nods but for the most part takes the film off in a new direction that is very much its own thing, just as Blade Runner was back in 1982. This may antagonize purists or those looking for easy answers but the original film was never about providing a safe resolution to everything and while Blade Runner 2049 has an emotionally satisfying conclusion, it doesn’t do that either. Kudos to Ridley Scott for convincing the powers that be to bankroll a very expensive art film. Much like the original, it has been underappreciated by mainstream movie-going audiences. It will, however, be studied and written about for years to come.

Hardware

Drone technology is commonplace now but back in 1990 it was a novel concept and Hardware (1990) anticipated the use of remote controlled robots for warfare making it eerily relevant now more than ever before. This film marked an auspicious debut for filmmaker Richard Stanley as he successfully tapped into the emerging alternative rock music genre of the late 1980s with Cyberpunk culture to create a distinctive science fiction film with political undertones fused with thriller genre tropes. While it received negative reviews from critics back in the day, it was modestly successful commercially and has since gone on to become a cult film.

We are introduced to a post-apocalyptic futureworld where scavengers roam the wasteland known as the Zone looking for anything they can sell. Civilization exists in an industrial graveyard where radiation levels are still high, keeping people inside. Moses Baxter (Dylan McDermott) is a forager who buys the disembodied head of a robot from a fellow scavenger as a Christmas present for his beautiful girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis), a multimedia artist that welds metal sculptures.

Early on, Jill says about her sculpture, “It’s like I’m fighting the metal and so far the metal is winning.” These words prove to prophetic as she takes the robot head and adds it to her massive sculpture. Unbeknownst to her and Mo the robot head is actually a highly advanced military drone known as the M.A.R.K. 13. It activates and begins to reassemble itself. It soon sees Mo and Jill as threats and thus begins a battle between humans and robot, flesh vs. metal, humanity vs. technology as the film hurtles towards a bloody, horror movie showdown.

I like that Stanley takes the time to develop the relationship between Mo and Jill. They love each other but there is a tension between them as they quarrel over having kids and population control. There is a believable intimacy between them and Dylan McDermott and Stacey Travis have excellent chemistry together. Jill is no damsel in distress and is much more resourceful than her physically stronger boyfriend who tends to go charging into a dangerous situation. With the help of Mo’s best friend, Shades (John Lynch), also physically inferior, confronts the M.A.R.K. 13.

McDermott does a solid job of playing a flawed but ultimately stand-up guy that genuinely cares for Jill even if he’s not a 100% committed to their relationship. Character actor extraordinaire William Hootkins (Star Wars) shows up as Jill’s creepy neighbor who is obsessed with her and has been stalking her for some time. The actor is not afraid to go for it, playing a completely distasteful person whose comeuppance is well-deserved.

Stanley makes some unusual musical choices, like Simon Boswell’s spaghetti western-tinged score that kicks off the film with the scavenger with no name (played by Fields of the Nephilim frontman Carl McCoy) wandering the wasteland, or playing classical music over Mo’s hallucinogenic demise complete with fractal imagery no less – the M.A.R.K. 13 literally orchestrating it all. It really earns its Cyberpunk credentials by including choice cuts like “Stigmata” by Ministry and “The Order of Death” by Public Image Ltd., which enhance the futuristic feel of the world Stanley has created.

Stanley fleshes out his futureworld via radio broadcasts featuring Iggy Pop as an enthusiastic DJ known as Angry Bob, providing tantalizing details of just how bad things have gotten. Outside, everything takes on a hellish red haze. Mo and Shades take a cab driven by none other than legendary rock ‘n’ roller Lemmy who puts on “Ace of Spades” by his band Motorhead on the stereo. Much like Blade Runner (1982), the desired destination for those who can afford it is outer space but who can afford it? Certainly not Mo and Jill.

The original idea for Hardware came out of a dream Richard Stanley had when he was 13:

“I had a series of dreams about the guy in the hat, the character that turns up in Dust Devil and a bunch of other things. In one dream he was searching for something, and he digs up the metal skull with the camera lens eyes and hypodermic teeth.”

Aspects of those dreams surfaced in a Super-8 short film entitled, “Incidents in an Expanding Universe,” that Stanley made piecemeal while going to school in South Africa when he was a teenager. Most of the inspiration for what would become Hardware came from music videos, horror comic books like Creepy and Eerie, as well as spaghetti westerns and Italian horror movies. He wrote the screenplay in a week while listening to Iron Maiden’s “Flash of the Blade” repeatedly.

After finishing the script for Wicked Films and TV, Ltd., Stanley joined a guerrilla Muslim faction in Afghanistan. While there, he was nearly killed by a Russian missile and spent three days wandering with a wounded comrade strapped to his back until he found a Red Cross refugee camp. It was there that he learned, via telex that a deal had been made with Palace Pictures to turn his script for Hardware into a film. Stanley went straight from the battlefield and into pre-production on his film.

Originally, Hardware was set in England but when Miramax got involved, becoming co-financier and its distributor in the United States, they insisted that American actors play Jill and Mo. Stanley wanted to cast Bill Paxton as Mo and Jeffrey Combs as Shades but was only allowed to employ two Americans and had already cast Stacey Travis as Jill, which meant that Combs was out. Stanley met with Paxton, who really wanted to do it, but couldn’t get out of his commitment to making Navy SEALs (1990). The filmmaker originally envisioned Mo to be more like a Hell’s Angel but Dylan McDermott changed him to a career military soldier that believes in family and reads The Bible. As a result, Stanley didn’t like the character as much because he lacked the deeper flaws he had originally envisioned.

The taxi cab driver was originally to be played by Sinead O’Connor but she had to pull out due to a scheduling conflict and Stanley persuaded hard rocker Lemmy to do it at the last minute for a bottle of Jack Daniels. He was given a shoulder holster with a pistol during filming and proceeded to draw it and the weapon accidentally fell out of his hand and into the Thames River, lost forever.

Most of the film was shot in the Roundhouse, an empty building that had been derelict for years (it used to be a concert venue for the likes of Jimi Hendrix), in Camden Town. The production built Jill’s apartment in the middle of the building and lived there for six weeks. Some city exteriors were filmed in Canning Town and Port Talbot in Wales, the latter of which had inspired the futureworlds of Blade Runner and Brazil (1984). The desert scenes were shot in Morocco. The production saved up enough money to take a crew of eight there and found it very challenging, encountering a “freak storm with flash floods and a lot of people drowned in a nearby town,” Stanley recalled.

The shooting schedule was originally set for seven weeks but stretched to nine with cast and crew working grueling 12-hour days, six days a week for little money. Six models of the M.A.R.K. 13 were used for filming with a modified battery remote-control one costing $80,000, a full costume, a foam one for stunt work, a fire resistant one, a pair of walking legs, and a bag of assorted parts.

Predictably, Hardware did not do well with critics at the time of its initial release. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Watching Hardware is like being trapped inside a video game that talks dirty.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “D+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “ It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set.” The Washington Post’s Richard Harrington wrote, “Hardware is an MTV movie, a mad rush of hyperkinetic style and futuristic imagery with little concern for plot (much less substance).” In her review for the Chicago Tribune, Johanna Steinmetz wrote, “Though it does know how to hammer home a point, Hardware doesn’t always have matching nuts and bolts.” Stanley said of his own film at the time: “I want to inflict serious damage on the audience…I’m sticking my finger up at everything. I purposely wrote the dialogue to be vitriolic and disgusting…I’m moving punk from vinyl to film.”

Society in Hardware is obsessed with population control and why not? Who would want to bring up children after World War III? Inhabitable space is of a premium after most of the world has been reduced to a derelict wasteland. For such a small budget, Stanley does an excellent job of creating a tangible world with its own distinctive lived-in look and feel.

Hardware warns of being over-reliant on technology as the M.A.R.K. 13 traps Jill in her apartment by taking control of the door locks, the phone and all of the electrical systems putting her at a severe disadvantage. Science fiction can often act as a warning – beware of what the future may bring or how the abuses of technology could be our undoing. We are supposed to heed the warnings of these fictional prophecies but we rarely do.

SOURCES

“Cult Director of Hardware Richard Stanley Interviewed.” The Quietus. June 24, 2009.

Forsythe, Coco. “Richard Stanley Interview: Dust Devil.” Future Movies. June 22, 2009.

Jones, Alan. “Hardware: Filming High Concept on Low Budget.” Cinefantastique. 1991.

McAllister, Matt. “Interview: Richard Stanley.” Sci-Fi Bulletin. 2009.

Nutman, Philip. “On Robots and Ratings.” Fangoria. 1990.

“Richard Stanley: Interview.” Time Out London.

Vijn, Aro. “Richard Stanley, I Presume? An Interview with the Director of Hardware.” Screen Anarchy. November 18, 2009.

Blade Runner

“It’s just like everything that is awful about the city, but at the same time, everything that is fascinating about it…and this, in many ways, is a futurist projection—it’s not so much escapist, it’s a projection of what life will be like in every major metropolis 40 years from now.” – Philip K. Dick, 1982

Big Brother is watching you. The Eye in the Sky. There Are Eyes Everywhere. 2016…or 2019? In this day and age, does three years matter? In 1982, however, the difference was cavernous and 2019 a lifetime away. The past has finally caught up with the present…or has the present finally caught up with the past? One of the first images shown in Blade Runner (1982): an extreme close-up of an eye – encapsulates all of this, for we are living in paranoid times. We are living in Philip K. Dick’s world. This film was based on his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He has become one of the most widely-adapted science fiction authors and with good reason. He crafted paranoid tales populated by damaged characters trying to figure out what it means to be human. What were once considered paranoid delusions have become tactile realities.

One of the first things that struck me about Blade Runner is its obsessive attention to detail. It is virtually impossible to take it all in upon an initial viewing. Only after watching it several times was I able to properly appreciate how fully-realized the world of Ridley Scott’s film is – a tangible future that “you can see and touch,” the director said in an interview, “it makes you a little uneasier because you feel it’s just round the corner.” This vivid world, designed by Syd Mead and Lawrence G. Paull with special effects by Douglas Trumbull, is the backdrop to a detective story. Ex-cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is brought out of retirement to find and kill four replicants, artificial people that are forbidden to be on Earth, but this is merely a launching pad for Scott to address a myriad of fascinating themes – predominantly, as with the novel, what it means to be human.

The first image is an establishing shot of a hellish cityscape that stretches as far as the eye can see. The next shot goes deeper into the city of Los Angeles as giant plumes of fire occasionally erupt from factories. The camera penetrates deeper into the landscape to finally locate the massive twin structures of the Tyrell buildings. Finally, the camera literally travels down to street level: neon signs, futuristic attire and lighted umbrellas are only a few of the images presented before finding Deckard reading a newspaper. This opening traces a detailed path from an ordered city on a grand scale…to the chaotic streets on an individual level.

The L.A. of Blade Runner consists of three distinct layers. The top one consists of huge, monolithic, pyramidal skyscrapers that dominate the landscape and contain the ordered offices of Tyrell. The middle layer represents middle class residential areas seen mostly as interiors like Deckard’s apartment. Finally, there is the bottom layer: crowded, garbage-strewn streets filled with the dregs of society – a pastiche of subcultures of humanity. These three layers are tied together by flying cars, elevators and a huge, hovering ad display ship that constantly advertises off-world propaganda.

The top layer is represented by Tyrell’s offices where Deckard runs the “Voight-Kampff” test on the latest replicant, Rachel (Sean Young). It takes place in an immense room populated by massive support columns that suggest strength. It is sparsely furnished with expensive accoutrements that convey wealth. The room is a mixture of Third Reich splendor and film noir style, as represented by Rachel with her angular dress and severely swept hairstyle: one half Nazi secretary, one half femme fatale. The Tyrell offices represent the pinnacle of this world’s tasteful opulence. According to Mead in an interview from 1982:

“The pyramid is very high tech compared to the rest of the movie, very sleek, a carefully arranged textural megalith. The pyramid is set in the middle of what was called ‘Hades.’ An endless plain, like the chemical plant area of New Jersey…It is the ultimate visual statement of where our society is headed in the future.”

The middle layer is a claustrophobic collection of canyons of buildings where the less fortunate live with some providing giant advertising space while a flying advertisement extols the virtues of living off-world: “The chance to begin again in the golden land of opportunity and adventure.” L.A. is presented as a city of ads: Coca-Cola, Atari and Pan-Am are surrounded by neon-like Japanese fast food joints. These ads are familiar objects that we recognize within this strange, chaotic environment. Deckard’s journey to the police station in a flying car gives us another chance to see the stunning cityscape with its collision of diversified architectural styles. As Scott said in an interview, “We’re in a city which is in a state of overkill, of snarled-up energy, where you can no longer remove a building because it costs far more than constructing one in its place.” He exemplifies this with the retro 1940s style décor of the police station. The old architecture wasn’t torn down but rather built on top of and around.

The climactic showdown between Deckard and head replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) takes place in the famous L.A. landmark, the Bradbury Building, which Scott transforms it from its once beautiful, ornately designed wrought-iron railings and cage elevators into noir nightmare – a deserted, dilapidated space strewn with garbage and debris. Deckard is chased through room after room by Batty in a harrowing sequence that resembles a horror film as the latter taunts and torments the former.

The street scenes are the most fascinating aspect of this filmic world. The first shot we get of it is the camera moving through the crowded, noisy streets to find Deckard waiting for his turn at a noodle stand. It is populated by a colorful assortment of people – punks, elderly people and so on, each with a distinctive look. He’s just one of many people in this city until he’s summoned by the cops to visit his old boss, Captain Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh).

The scene where Deckard chases renegade replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) through the busy streets really shows off the bottom layer in all of its anarchic splendor. Scott orchestrates an audio/visual assault on the senses as Deckard fights his way through crowds. The director also subverts the norm of always keeping the protagonist in focus by continually obscuring Deckard with smoke, people and vehicles. The populace is a fascinating collection of ethnicities and subcultures resulting in one of the first truly multicultural future cities. The soundtrack is also a cacophony of vehicle horns, people talking and the incessant chatter of street signs that adds to the sense of urgency as he cuts through all of this confusion to find Zhora.

The L.A. of Blade Runner isn’t some sterile futureworld but a lived-in reality that feels like it existed before the film began and will continue to do so after it ends. All of this painstaking attention to detail immerses us in this universe and it grounds the characters in a tangible experience. It also transports us immediately to 2019 Los Angeles, difficult to do in a futuristic science fiction film; a lot of explanation is usually done up front so as not to confuse the audience. After a brief preamble textual scrawl, however, Scott drops us right in and expects the viewer to keep up and buy into the world he’s created.

“Looking back on what I saw, I realized that we are in an information decade. Information is the life blood, the metabolism of the modern world. And that basically people will be going in to see Blade Runner as information junkies.” – Philip K. Dick, 1982

We are living in Philip K. Dick’s future. Try making eye contact with someone on the bus or train. They are buried in their cell phone or iPod or some other electronic device. We are under constant electronic surveillance, be it cameras or remote controlled drones. The answer to what it means to be human may appear to be wildly different now than it was 34 years ago but it is quite the same. It is our species’ humanity that’s become buried beneath technology; Blade Runner was a warning that clearly was not heeded.

SOURCES

Kennedy, Harlan. “21^st Century Nervous Breakdown.” Film Comment. July-August 1982.

Lee, Gwen and Doris E. Sauter. “Thinker of Antiquity.” Starlog. January 1990.

Mitchell, Blake and James Ferguson. “Syd Mead: Futurist and Production Designer Talks about Ridley Scott’s Newest SF Thriller Bladerunner.” Fantastic Films. November 1982.

Strange Days

Mainstream popular culture’s flirtation with the Cyberpunk genre reached its cinematic zenith in 1995 with Johnny Mnemonic, Judge Dredd, Virtuosity, Hackers, and Strange Days. They all underperformed at the box office for various reasons and with varying degrees of success managed to convey the aesthetics and themes of the genre. The most satisfying film from the class of ’95 was Strange Days, an action thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. Bigelow had already dabbled in the Cyberpunk genre by directing an episode of the sci-fi television miniseries Wild Palms in 1993. She was clearly testing the waters for what would be a full-on treatment with Strange Days. Anchored by strong performances from Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett, the film explores some fascinating ideas, addresses topical issues and comes closest of any film at that point since Blade Runner (1982) to translating the ideas of Cyberpunk authors like William Gibson onto film despite a disappointing ending.

Bigelow starts things off audaciously as we experience a restaurant robbery from the point-of-view of one of the assailants, following them as they are subsequently chased by the police. After the sequence ends she reveals that it was all recorded via illegal technology known as SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that allows the user to experience the sights, sounds and sensations of the subject recorded directly from their cerebral cortex.

Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is a slightly upscale street hustler that deals in these discs, but draws the line at “blackjack clips” (a.k.a. snuff films) because he’s got ethics. James Cameron and Jay Cocks’ tech slang-heavy dialogue in the opening exchange between Lenny and his supplier, a jittery guy named Tick (the always watchable Richard Edson), does a fantastic job of immersing us in the former’s world by the way he speaks and acts. As Lenny drives through the streets of Los Angeles, making deals on his cell phone, Bigelow provides us with glimpses of a city in decline. It’s as if the 1992 L.A. Riots never completely ended as we see burning shells of cars, soldiers patrolling the streets and three women beating on a man dressed as Santa Claus.

Meanwhile, a young woman named Iris (Brigitte Bako) is running for her life from two cops (Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner) whom she witnessed and recorded on a SQUID device killing prominent rapper and outspoken activist Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer). If the recording is made public it will put an already unstable general populace over the edge.

Strange Days features, without a doubt, my favorite performance of Ralph Fiennes’ career. At the time, it was seen as casting against type, but in retrospect it was a stellar example of his impressive range and willingness to immerse himself in a character. Lenny tries to talk his way out of a number of dicey situations and is only sometimes successful. From his expensive yet sleazy-looking wardrobe to his rapid-fire patter, Lenny is a slick operator fast-talking his way through life, but whose whole world changes when he watches a particularly disturbing SQUID clip. Fiennes does an incredible job of portraying a man stuck in a rut of his own making and is eventually forced to take stock of his life.

Lenny also has a tough-love friendship with Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), a no-nonsense private security contractor. They banter back and forth but when he occasionally tests the limits of their friendship she gives him a reality check about the chaotic mess that is his life. Angela Bassett is a revelation as Lenny’s ass-kicking friend. She exudes a toughness that not only comes with her profession but is also part of her character and a survival instinct. Mace may be hard on Lenny, but it is only because she cares about him. Bassett and Fiennes share a nice scene together where Mace cleans up Lenny after Philo’s goons gave him a tune-up. It’s a touching moment that says so much about their friendship. What I find interesting about Mace is how Bigelow reverses the traditional action stereotype by having her be the tough action star who can handle herself while Lenny consistently gets the crap kicked out of him and has to be rescued. She’s also the voice of reason and helps him finally let go of his attachment to Faith.

The 1990s was a good decade for Tom Sizemore with memorable roles in films like True Romance (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), Heat (1995), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). He had a bit part in Bigelow’s previous film, Point Break (1991), and is well-cast as Lenny’s other close friend, Max Peltier who humors his continued obsession with Faith. Like Lenny, he’s an ex-cop only he got into the private investigation business. Sizemore brings his customary easygoing charm to the role and gets to say one of the film’s most memorable lines when Max tells Lenny, “The issue isn’t whether you’re paranoid, Lenny … The issue is whether you’re paranoid enough.” There’s a fantastic give-and-take between Fiennes and Sizemore that makes their characters’ long-standing friendship instantly believable. It’s all in the shorthand and the good-natured ball-busting between them that is fun to watch.

When he’s not on the street making deals, Lenny relives key moments of a past relationship with ex-girlfriend Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), a singer now involved with her manager Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). While the cast is uniformly excellent, the lone exception is Juliette Lewis who simply isn’t convincing as Lenny’s object of obsession. She broods and sulks her way through Strange Days and plays such an unlikeable character that you wonder what Lenny sees in Faith. I don’t find her all that attractive, especially in this role and she comes across as flat in her scenes with Fiennes who is obviously a much superior actor. This film also further emboldened Lewis to continue singing off-camera, joining other actors that fancy themselves rock stars.

Unfortunately, Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner are largely wasted as anonymous rogue cops that make things tough for our heroes. The latter utters one or two sentences the entire film and the former reprises his psychotic grin from Full Metal Jacket (1987) and little else.

At the time, much was made of a particularly disturbing sequence in which Lenny watches a SQUID clip of a man raping and killing a woman. To make matters even worse, the killer wires up his victim so that she experiences him getting off on raping her. Rape is always a tricky thing to depict and Bigelow is clearly not glorifying it, but showing it to be an ugly, horrifying act. I think it is important that she makes a point of showing how upset the clip makes anyone who watches it. In regards to this scene, Cameron said in an interview, “Rather than glorifying violence, it puts you in the driver’s seat of being the killer. That deglamorizes it.” Bigelow said, “My hope is that the violence is understood in its context. The violence is designed to be horrific. It’s designed to make you think it is awful.”

The screenplay is at its best when its dialogue immerses us in this near-future world. For example, we witness Lenny pitching the SQUID experience to a neophyte. He tells the potential client, “This is not like T.V. only better. This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you’re there, you’re doing it, you’re seeing it, you’re hearing it, you’re feeling it.” These words beautifully sum up how the technology works and its allure. It is the ultimate in virtual reality. For thirty minutes you get to be someone else and experience what they went through without any of the potentially messy consequences. It’s the latest in voyeuristic thrills. Fiennes really shines during this scene as he seduces the potential client with his pitch in a riveting performance, telling him at one point, “I’m your priest. I’m your shrink. I’m your main connection to the switchboard of the soul. I’m the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious.”

James Cameron came up with the idea for Strange Days in 1985, but it wasn’t until 1993 that he mapped out the entire film in a 140-page screenplay/treatment hybrid. However, he was beginning work on True Lies (1994) and unable to make it himself. He contacted ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow and asked if she was interested in directing Strange Days. She found herself drawn to its “incredibly clever, great concept,” and how it “operates on many levels.” Bigelow contacted ex-Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks, whom she had worked with previously on an unrealized Joan of Arc film, and asked him to complete Cameron’s partially finished script.

After the L.A. Riots, Bigelow helped with the clean-up effort and this provided a lot of visuals for the film: “You’d be on a street corner with these shells of buildings that once were, with tanks and National Guard cruising by.” Unlike science fiction films like Blade Runner and Total Recall (1990), Bigelow set Strange Days in a “hyperkinetic, darker version of today … It’s a future that we’re almost living in.”

Ralph Fiennes was drawn to the role of Lenny Nero because it wasn’t an “obvious contemporary action hero.” He saw the character as “weak, he’s emotionally screwed-up, he’s a bit of a jerk – but he’s likeable. He’s not particularly brave, and somehow he comes through the shit and is okay.” Cameron identified with Lenny, saying in an interview, “Lenny is me. There is a certain aspect of a filmmaker that is a salesman, who has to be able to sell a studio on a movie.” To research the role, Fiennes met with and drove around with Los Angeles police officers.

The exciting foot chase between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break gave Bigelow the confidence to do the point-of-view chases in Strange Days. To film the first person SQUID clips, the director and her team had to build a stripped-down Steadicam that was light and versatile. She constructed and even choreographed the opening restaurant robbery sequence to be continuous and unbroken even though the final version has cuts. To create the massive New Year’s Eve celebration at the climax of the film, the production staged a rave with 10,000 people in downtown L.A. with performances by Deee-Lite and Aphex Twin. Over the course of filming that night, five people were hospitalized from overdosing on the hallucinogenic drug Ecstasy.

Strange Days received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “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.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Fiennes gleefully captures Lenny’s sleaziness while also showing there is something about this schlockmeister that is worth saving, despite much evidence to the contrary. As for Ms. Bassett, she looks great and radiates inner strength even without the bone-crunching physical feats to which she is often assigned.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers described it as Bigelow’s “magnum opus,” and “a visionary triumph.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Bigelow, a poet of cheap thrills, turns the audience into eager voyeurs. I only wish she’d stayed with her premise. Strange Days has a dazzling atmosphere of grunge futurism, but beneath its dark satire of audiovisual decadence lurks a naggingly conventional underworld thriller.” Newsweek magazine’s Jack Kroll wrote, “As the New Century approaches in an eruption of racial conflict, murderous cops and battered heroes, the movie screeches into reverse and love conquers all. It’s not that a happy ending is bad, it’s that it comes from nowhere but a failure of nerve.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Strange Days does have a superior cast, but only Bassett manages to survive the numskull script, and that just barely.”

Even though Strange Days is set in the near future, it is very much a film of its time. The killing of Jeriko One and the subsequent cover-up eerily anticipates the deaths of real-life rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. even though I’m sure Cameron and Cocks were inspired by the beating of Rodney King, which led to the subsequent L.A. Riots in 1992. It appears that Bigelow’s film is heading towards a riot of similar if not bigger proportions, but during the third act Cameron and Cocks lose the courage of their convictions and opt for a love conquers all cliché ending when a Rome is burning finale would have been a more fitting conclusion. It robs Strange Days of its power so that it’s merely a good film instead of a great one.

SOURCES

Heath, Chris. “Are You Feeling Lucky, Cyberpunk?” Empire. April 1996.

Hochman, Steve. “Rave Party Extras Are Deee-Lited.” Los Angeles Times. September 19, 1994.

McGavin, Patrick Z. “One Director’s Reality Check.” Chicago Tribune. October 15, 1995.

Smith, Gavin. “Momentum and Design.” Film Comment. September-October 1995.

Spelling, Ian. “Strange Genesis.” Starlog. January 1996.

Yakir, Dan. “Strange Days.” Starlog. November 1995.

Neuromancer

It is amazing to think that William Gibson’s debut novel, Neuromancer, turns 30 years old this year. It was a landmark science fiction novel that helped spearhead the Cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction. As the author has said in interviews, it came out at just the right time when people were receptive to such a stylish, dystopic vision of the future. Gibson’s novel went on to become the first winner of the science fiction “triple crown” – the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award – and influenced countless other SF novels and films.

Neuromancer is the first of three novels (and three short stories) that comprise the Sprawl trilogy – all set in the same fictional world sharing the occasional character and referencing events that happened in another story. The first novel focuses on Case, a burnt-out cyberspace cowboy who used to be in-demand for his superior hacking skills that saw him infiltrate and raid corporate databases in the Matrix. However, when he ripped off one of his employers, Case’s nervous system was severely damaged by a nasty mycotoxin that prevented him from hacking. He is given another chance by a shady group that will fix his nervous system in order for his help infiltrate a massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Wintermute with the help of Molly, a beautiful and deadly mercenary.

Neuromancer presents disturbing visions of our glitzy urban culture that often reflect our feelings of despair, confusion and victimization. The world in this book is shaped by two major influences that have had a profound effect on content and style. He has been inspired by the use of the cut-up methods and quick-fire stream of dissociated images of William S. Burroughs, and the ability to blend prose with technology from Thomas Pynchon. In Neuromancer, Gibson creates a world from his own observations of popular culture at the time: a collage of twentieth-century images heightened to a nightmarish level whose flash and appeal overshadows humanity.

Gibson's style of prose in Neuromancer has often been described as "Chandleresque," but as he admits in interviews, his prose owes more to the influences of William S. Burroughs: “I don't write like Raymond Chandler. I've hardly even read Raymond Chandler. Any Chandler influences I have are by cultural osmosis; for instance I think there is a fair bit of Chandler in William S. Burroughs.” Gibson creates characters that are reminiscent of the ones in a Burroughs novel. For example, Case is very similar to Bill Lee, the main protagonist in Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Both characters are overwhelmed by a sense of paranoia of living in a dangerous big city. This is evident when Case is being followed by Molly at the beginning of Neuromancer:

”The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let the crowd carry him along.”

For Case, a certain level of paranoia is common in this dangerous world. However, the sense that he is being followed increases this feeling and he fights to control it. This sense of paranoia can also seen in the beginning of Naked Lunch:

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights of down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train ... And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat-trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform ... But the subway is moving. ‘So long flatfoot!’ I yell, giving the fruit his B production.”

This passage conveys a feeling of fear and paranoia. The narrator can "feel the heat closing in," as Case in Neuromancer fights his "adrenaline surge," both experiencing a sensory overload by their surroundings. Case and Bill Lee are both being chased in these passages by not only a mysterious figure, but by their own fear of paranoia. There is so much going in the settings of both novels. Burroughs and Gibson accurately convey the fast paced lifestyle of contemporary urban life, where only the strong survive. Gibson sums up this lifestyle best when he writes, "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." This description also applies to the world that Burroughs creates in Naked Lunch, which was a conscious influence on Gibson.

Gibson, like Burroughs, also sees himself as an outsider in the world of science fiction. It is this view that sets Gibson apart from other science fiction writers:

“What Burroughs was doing with plot and language and the SF motifs I saw in other writers was literally mind expanding. I saw this crazy outlaw character who seemed to have picked up SF and gone after society with it, the way some old guy might grab a rusty beer opener and start waving it around. Once you've had that experience, you're not quite the same.”

Gibson is fascinated with how Burroughs reinvents the structure of the novel in his books. Naked Lunch uses the cut-up technique, a controlled use of collage where random pieces of prose are pasted together to simulate the feeling of fragmented thought. This influence is seen in Case's dreams:

“Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach. Linda. Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office. Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood.”

This passage is very fragmented in nature to simulate the speed of Case's thoughts. Images race through his mind at a very fast rate. Case's thoughts shift from Julius Deane's death to Linda's death, back to Deane's death, then to Linda and finally to Molly. Gibson takes an image, like Deane's death, and looks for ways to relate this image to the rest of the novel via a controlled use of collage, which is what Burroughs does in his novels.

Gibson uses SF to comment on the current situation of society much in the same way that Burroughs does in his novels. Burroughs uses his novels to comment on how rapidly society is decaying:

”America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting. And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practiced, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt.”

Burroughs sees under through the pretty facade that the media presents and shows what America is really like: "old and dirty and evil," filled with "snarling," and "menacing," people. Gibson also takes existing problems like drugs, pollution, and corporate monopolies and "keeps one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." In other words, he takes these problems and heightens them to nightmarish levels much like Burroughs does in his novels, and shows how bad things could get if these problems are not solved.

Gibson's novels are very visual in style. His descriptions are so vivid and detailed that the novel flows like a film. This style is influenced by Thomas Pynchon's novels, in particular Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon combines images and figures from popular culture with literature and technology to illustrate how overwhelmed we are by the media. He does not restrict himself to one medium. Gibson takes images from various media in the same fashion: “I know I don't have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments, and I don't separate literature from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film – all provide material in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious.”

From the opening lines of Neuromancer, this "sense of writing" is evident. Gibson mixes elements from film noir in his descriptions of Night City and its inhabitants with characters like Linda Lee, who is a character out of Lou Reed song. Gibson takes images and ideas from various art forms and makes them his own. This is evident when Case visits Julius Deane and Gibson describes Deane's office in great detail:

“Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kadinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time.”

This passage is an example of Gibson's "compulsive use of brand names." He is drawing attention to how much brand names and popular culture play a role in our daily lives. In this passage alone Gibson refers to "Neo-Aztec" architecture, "Disney" pop culture kitsch, "Kandinsky" fine art, and "Dali-clock" surrealism. Gibson is acting like a customer in a "supermarket of 20th-century works," taking what he wants to get his point across. This passage also conveys a feeling of sensory overload. The reader is being bombarded with so many popular culture references that it all begins to blur together. Gibson is blurring the distinctions between fantasy and reality and asking the question, where does fantasy end and reality begin in world where these lines are not concrete? Pynchon also asks this question and goes one step further than Gibson. He uses figures from real life with his own characters in Gravity's Rainbow:

“It was one of Groucho Marx's vulgar friends. The sound is low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette. ‘What,’ she inquires, ‘is that?’ Margaret Dumont smiles, throws out her chest, looks down her nose. ‘Well it sounds,’ she replies, ‘like a kazoo.’ For all Slothrop knows, it was a kazoo.”

Pynchon creates a world where Groucho Marx, Bette Davis and Margaret Dumont all know each other and know Slothrop, a character created by the author. Pynchon no longer has any distinctions between fantasy and reality. Everything is mixed together. Gibson does this as well, but not on the radical level that is seen in Pynchon's novels.

The Cyberpunk genre was influenced by the New Wave of SF writers that started appearing after legends that came before them were established. Some of the New Wave writers that influenced them were Harlan Ellison, who presented a streetwise, hardened, grab-you-by-the-throat style. There was Norman Spinrad, who presented a fast, furious future filled with rock ‘n’ roll rebels. J.G. Ballard was a British SF writer who also presented a hard edge to his work, but focused on technoshock, the human reaction to technology. Philip K. Dick presented one of the best visions of the future – an ecologically ravaged Earth with all the “best” specimens traveling to the far reaches of space leaving behind everyone else.

According to Bruce Sterling, one of the self-proclaimed Cyberpunks, the name came from cyber – meaning cybernetic, a mating of flesh and chrome, and punk – the late 1970s movement of radical rock ‘n’ roll that questioned society and challenged authority. Five authors emerged as the first generation Cyberpunks: William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and Sterling. They shared common themes, ideas, outlooks and a common symbol – mirrorshades: a unique symbol that suggested rebellion, craziness and a dangerous nature behind those mirrored, chrome glasses. Chrome and matte black became the Cyberpunk colors.

These writers loved style, were fashion conscious and prized “garage band mentality,” as Sterling said in a defining essay on the genre. They joined the ideas of technology and culture together. The main characters in their novels were usually cybernetically enhanced in some way that would show how the character coped with the invasion of technology in his or her body. The character would have to overcome the sense of technoshock and realize their human side or be lost to machines forever, risking alienation of friends and family. The world is often an ecologically ravaged, corrupt place with endless cities of concrete and glass. Pollution covers the sky, blotting out the sun. The setting can often be broken down to three levels: the bottom or street level where most of the characters live and die, filled with poor and desperate people. Next, is above the street – the middle class in their apartments or condos who live life a little better, but still deal with the riff raff of the streets. Finally, there is the high-rise or corporate level populated by powerful businessmen. The main characters of Cyberpunk stories are usually hackers, musicians or mercenaries selling their skills to the highest bidder. A lot of characters are hooked on drugs that give them an edge. Artificial intelligence and the virtual reality known as cyberspace plays an important role in a lot of Cyberpunk fiction, particularly Gibson’s. He treated the Internet like another dimension, a sort of astral plane where characters can imagine themselves as whatever they want to be. They can travel to databases all over the world to steal information, which is the most important commodity.

The short stories “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” were early forays into the world Gibson would expand in greater detail with Neuromancer. After writing “Burning Chrome,” Gibson felt that he was four or five years away from writing a novel, but as luck would have it, editor Terry Carr was looking for promising authors and asked Gibson if he wanted to write a book. He agreed without realizing what a monumental task it would be: “In fact I was terrified once I actually sat down and started to think about what I meant. I didn’t think I could fill up that many pages. I didn’t even know how many pages the manuscript of a novel was ‘supposed’ to have.” Gibson was motivated by “blind animal panic” to write the book and “fueled by my terrible fear of losing the reader’s attention.” He looked back at his short stories to see what made them work and took the character of Molly from “Johnny Mnemonic” and the world he created in “Burning Chrome,” and put them in Neuromancer.

While writing Neuromancer, Gibson was not influenced by Cyberpunk-ian films like Blade Runner (1982) and Tron (1982), but rather John Carpenter’s film Escape from New York (1981), which was a significant influence:

“I was intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake: ‘You flew the wing-five over Leningrad, didn’t you?’ It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF, where a casual reference can imply a lot.”

Much of the techno-speak in the book came from Gibson overhearing a word or phrase and appropriating it for his own uses:

“I like accidents, when an offhand line breezes by and you think to yourself, Yes, that will do. So you put it in your text and start working with it, seeing how it relates to other things you’ve got going, and eventually it begins to evolve, to branch off in ways you hadn’t anticipated.”

A lot of the language in Gibson’s novel came from dope dealer’s slang or biker talk circa 1969 Toronto. For example, “flatlining” (ambulance driver slang for “death”) was a word he heard in a bar 20 years prior to writing Neuromancer and applied it to hackers getting killed in cyberspace and then dying in real life. Ironically, Gibson knew very little about computers prior to writing his book, which allowed him to romanticize them:

“It wasn’t until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there’s a drive mechanism inside – this little thing that spins around. I’d been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player.”

Gibson actually came up with the cyberspace concept in “Burning Chrome” and carried it over to Neuromancer. He was inspired by kids playing video games in downtown Vancouver arcades:

“I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected.”

Humans, like Case are dependent on technology, like junkies. Technology is overwhelming us as it becomes part of our daily lives. There is a definite lack of emotion or optimism in Neuromancer where at the end of the novel Case and Molly survive, but never see each other again. Gibson’s novel explores the relationship between humans and their environment and how we interact with it. The most important aspect of this book is that the author is commenting on current society, examining the difference between reality and fantasy and how paranoia and popular culture blur these lines until there seems to be no distinction between the two sides.

Not surprisingly, the popularity of Neuromancer inspired several offshoots, including graphic novel, a video game (featuring a song by Devo no less), a radio play and even an opera. There have been several attempts to adapt it into a film with screenplays written by the likes of music video director Chris Cunningham and film director Chuck Russell (The Blob). In recent years, Joseph Kahn (Torque) was lined up to direct an adaptation starring Milla Jovovich, but that also fizzled out and currently Vincenzo Natali (Splice) is working on directing the film from his own screenplay with assistance from Gibson. Whether this latest incarnation gets made remains to be seen, but it demonstrates the continued interest in Gibson’s novel and how well it has aged over the years.

SOURCES

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1992.

Dorsey, Candas J. "Beyond Cyberspace." Books in Canada. June-July 1988.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books, 1984.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio. Duke University Press, 1991.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. Viking Press, 1973.

Sterling, Bruce. “Preface to Mirrorshades.” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. Bruce Sterling. Ace Books. 1986.