Hacker Cinema
Strange Days
1995 · Film · 145 min
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
In the last days of 1999, ex-cop turned street hustler Lenny Nero receives a disc which contains the memories of the murder of a prostitute. With the help of bodyguard Mace, he starts to investigate and is pulled deeper and deeper in a whirl of murder, blackmail and intrigue.
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59 comments on Hacker News
Strange Days - the movie - scenario.
Such a crap, corny movie. Cliché dialogues. Didn't age well, typical 90s techbabblebullshit drivel.
Strange days OTOH...
It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.
Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.
The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged after Neuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
This is sort of explored in the film Strange Days, which is probably not very well known generally but perhaps would have a large fan base on HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Had no idea til I looked it up just now that James Cameron did the story, of Avatar, which shares a lot of tech influences with Strange Days. They could even be in the same cinematic universe, though many years apart.
"Strange Days" is set in the days leading up to new year's eve of the Millennium. O:-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txG9rOW8Jx0 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Beyond_the_Stars -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Suddenly I remember this movie from the 90s where people drugged themself with some kind of minidisc. “Strange Days”, maybe? Anyhow, I always found the plot weird, but maybe they actually were onto something…
Film geeks still talk about Strange Days. It has a cult following.
As others are pointing out, it was Strange Days... even though it may seem like a common plot, that movie is pretty unique IMHO in how far it takes the concept.
> Anyone knows which movie was that?
Strange Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
You're saying both of those no longer exist on streaming services? That's a goddamned tragedy (though I have local copies of both).
Side note, I first watched Strange Days on a VR headset (the Gear VR) while on a 6hr flight, having no idea the movie would be about virtual reality. That felt pretty damn special.
>Think of all the countless valuable film, music, etc that didn't have the acclaim of The Matrix. Gone sooner, and more prolifically.
E.g. Existenz and Strange Days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
There was also a scene in the movie Strange Days, which has the plot that in the future memories can be recorded and then replayed (even by other people) like movies. In the scene someone gets their brain fried by having a short loop of pleasure played for hours on end.
I think a lot of the west first saw them in an early Ralph Fiennes film - Strange Days.
The disc is shown in the first 20 seconds of the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ
I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside from general availability.
The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second) plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning CDs which were all still write-only in that era.
Even though I am Italian and Nirvana is probably the last good sci-fi movie we made, Nirvana itself owns a lot to 1995 Strange Days.
Dude, check out the 1995 film "Strange Days".
Not enough people have seen the movie Strange Days.
Watching recordings of people doing interesting things could be the killer feature.
Porn is obvious, but even just experiencing the recording of someone walking through some beautiful place will be a treat.
The 3D video recording/watching feature made me slightly uncomfortable by reminding me of the movie "Strange Days". I imagine the porn industry has their own use cases for it (which Apple itself will of course never mention).
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
When I think about procedurally generated entertainment, that can be materialized on demand, I find my self thinking about the movie Strange Days.
Will the future be one of societal fragmentation where 1) nobody ever rewatches anything, they just generate more new stuff 2) nobody watches each others work ("hey watch my feed I just generated, it was awesome" followed by "yeah sure, someday") and just watches more new custom stuff generated for them which just becomes 3) everybody is watching an endless feed of new procedurally generated levels like endless runner games and 4) there is no longer any shared experience between people that they can realistically use as a foundation to communicate or interact.
OR will the future be MOSTLY the previous but with a counterculture market for vintage (and modern) "authentic experiences" some of which will be black market. And then as part of that counterculture demand, how much of the "authentic experience" content be counterfeit procedurally generated to look real. And then the act of consuming counterfeit "authentic experiences" en mass just becomes a role play archeology treasure hunting game.
Strange Days is fantastic. It worked particularly well at just that moment in time, with the LA riots fresh in mind and the millennium coming up. It's one of the best cyberpunk movies I know of, and horribly underrated.
Strange Days is a movie I go back to every now and then. It's bleakly great.
Trivia: Angela Bassett saying "right here, right now" from this movie is the sample used by Fatboy Slim on the song of the same name.
Movie scene: https://youtu.be/JmL5uWrvUUM
Full song: https://youtu.be/ub747pprmJ8
Another great movie if you loved Johnny Mnemonic is Strange Days (1995).
Its directed by the great Kathryn Bigelow and it too has MiniDiscs in it!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
Max Headroom
Both the original film '20 Minutes into the Future' and the US drama series. All very 80s cyberpunk. Mega corps and dystopia
Serial Experiment Lain
Lain explores 'The Wired' communication network and reality and the digital bleed together.
Strange Days
Noir styled look at abuse of power. A black market seller of recording of people emotions and memories tries to uncover who committed a murder.
Cyberpunk documentary
I know you said no documentaries but this covers many of the films and TV shows mentioned
Part 1 - https://youtu.be/sttm8Q9rOdQ
Part 2 - https://youtu.be/0VoX3vr6CCM
Part 3 - https://youtu.be/KczJNtexinY
> idiotic licensing issues nobody cares about
The owner of the license cares about it.
This is not copyright being self defeating. This is copyright working as intended. If the persons who own the rights to something don't want to sell it, why do you think random third parties should suddenly be entitled to sell it instead and keep the money?
Sure it's frustrating as a consumer sometimes, and the copyright expiration periods are way too long now in the us. But how is the concept itself flawed, except to self-rationalize theft/piracy?
My latest irritation on this front is the movie Strange Days. One of my old favorites, and my partner has never seen it. The police violence narrative is powerful. Angela Bassett's performance is fire. Juliette Lewis's musical performances are great. It's not available for purchase on bluray in the US, and it's not on any streaming services in the US. Press speculation reports James Cameron owns the rights, and wants to personally oversee the remaster instead of trusting it to others. And he's not got around to that yet. Are you arguing my desire to watch the movie should override James Cameron, the producer and copyright holder's decisions on when or how to sell their artwork?
The problem with your wager is that on a long enough timeline, the doomsayers are always right.
So saying anything OR societal collapse is going to evaluate to true.
There are any number of disasters, both terrestrial and cosmic, that can radically change the landscape of the Earth.
I also don't really find discussions about what's going to happen beyond our lifetime that interesting for the most part. Often, they're just fantastic wishing attached to some loose thread of logic.
The Island
Escape from New York
The Running Man
Akira
Strange Days
A Scanner Darkly
Back to the Future II
Blade Runner
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We Make Contact
Death Race 2000
1984
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Freejack
Westworld
Real Steel
Pacific Rim
12 Monkeys
The Abyss
Timecop
And a host of other films and books are set in futures that are now our past. And while some of these are fantasy designed to entertain, they all make assumptions about what would be possible by that time. And we have fallen woefully short of those predictions. So short, that "flying cars and meals in pill form" is a meme about such predictions.
Strange Days film explores some interesting stuff like this.
> brain inside body
But why is your experience tied to one brain and not another.
Not op but I'll throw in some that I've really enjoyed and that made me go "hmmmm", roughly ordered by year
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1600-la-double-vie-de-v-ronique
Strange Days (1995) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/281-strange-days
Upstream Color (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/145197-upstream-color
Under the Skin (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/97370-under-the-skin
The One I Love (2014) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/242090-the-one-i-love
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/413852-welcome-the-stranger
Segfault (2018) (the less you know the better) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/463594-segfault
Possessor (2020) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/435615-possessor
I thought that it was interesting that Gabe was using The Matrix as a comparison for BCIs since that movie was a warning about what this kind of tech could bring, but he did express a lot of concern around more real-world ramifications around what this technology could bring if it wasn't properly used or secured. What he was describing then reminded me more of the movie Strange Days where people would use neural connectors to record and play back experiences from others, but amplifying the signal too much would result in scrambled neurons.
I always thought that "Strange Days" was one of the prime examples of "underrated movies", so it often gets mentioned that it gets rarely mentioned ;)
(Another movie I'd put in this group, Arnold Braunschweiger's "Last Action Hero" incidentally also has some mini disc usage)
I believe Minidisc was also the medium of choice in "Strange Days", a pretty good and still very relevant movie that gets mentioned rarely for some reason.
It was preceded by Strange Days (1995) - which no doubt contributed to that moment in the film.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
This idea has already been used in a movie 24 years ago. Check out "Strange Days" (1995)
I appreciated the article but was feeling the same way.
Mainly the portion about working primarily in VR and refurnishing the lab for reclining on the floor as a result. It's interesting, but foreign to me. Strange Days and Existenz are cool movies and all, but I just don't find VR that compelling.
I'm glad someone is working to find meaningful experiences in these new mediums though.
While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.
My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.
God, the memories...
2000 seemed sort of like an event horizon, back in the day, until we shot past it. "Strange Days" was a film made in 1994-95, set in 1999, and yet somehow 1999 was still the far future, full of cyberpunk stuff.
So it sounds like what we need is a way for people to think they're really committing suicide, but in reality they're not, so they can go through the experience and realize they don't really want to do it after all.
This reminds me a bit of that movie "Strange Days" (where people relived others' experiences), or of course "The Matrix".
there was a movie about this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
You kids ever hear of Strange Days? Loved that movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
>My idea for a VR killer app was to have the camera attached to the front of a Red Bull airplane or snowboard. My friend, understanding more intimately human nature, realized it should be getting drunk, breaking into a bank and possibly getting involved in homicide.
Isn't that the premise of the film Strange Days?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
‘Strange Days’ is a great movie that I feel captures some of the Sci-Fi zeitgeist around the millennium, the burgeoning internet, and a bit of cyberpunk. The subject matter is rather dark and disturbing, which I believe has led it to be rather obscure. But it makes a powerful and prescient statement about how tech empowers and dehumanizes us, porn, addiction, exploitation, and fandom. It’s an incredibly powerful statement that is quite relevant.
You see the dark side of that kind of nostalgia in movies like Strange Days and Minority Report. There's a real danger to continually reliving the memories that should ordinarily fade into the past. It's almost a sort of self inflicted PTSD.
It was cheesey. The focus of the conspiracy was the political assassination of a musician, except whenever movies try to fictionalize a wildly popular artist, it usually deflates the premise because you're forced into imagining why the artist is so popular.
The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah.
Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much.
With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
>The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.
The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong.
Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?
This is definitely not true. If you're looking for stuff that's popular here and now, you'll do fine (especially if you're a fan of Hollywood blockbusters). But as soon as you start looking for back catalogue stuff, you're in a mess of dead torrents and broken links.
Want to find a mostly-forgotten science fiction movie from the mid-90s (in my case, Strange Days)? Two hours of hunting for a way of downloading it led me to buying it through a VoD service instead.
Been trying to follow this development specifically for a while now and glad to have a long-form write-up about it. Behind the scenes is great. I just wish it didn't read like they'd spent five months guzzling the kool-aid. I mean, okay I get it, sounds exciting, you got it see it up close, we haven't yet, etc. Reads a bit much like quotes from a movie poster though..."Unleashes the potential of the Internet! Immersive! Astounding!"
>Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds.
So, just like XBox Live, teenagers can yell obscenities at you! Half-joking here. Also relevant:
"Lenny! I don't deal black-jack clips! It's policy. I got ethics here." (Strange Days)
The movie strange days where experiences are recorded on a personal recorder and can be played back although that movie was from 1999 so an updated version would have those experiences transmitted to the cloud..
A nice surprise for me was the effectiveness of 1st-person, live-action, 3D recordings viewed through the Rift. With the Rift and decent headphones, it's truly a Being John Malkovich / Strange Days experience. VR goggles can convey that experience much better than a TV/movie screen ever could. Ex: Avatars in the Rift have personal space. If you get too close to someone in VR, it's uncomfortable just like going nose-to-nose in real space. No movie screen has ever made me feel like that.
Here's my list of favorite videos so far:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXaxVLNMIxU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zaYrd0LvI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eByvt8he58U&t=1m10s
http://vimeo.com/64769947 NSFW
I have viewed 360 vids on the Rift. It's true they are not stereo, but they are still very effective. Simply being able to turn your head an look around is a significant aspect of presence. These two vids http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN7HtvXc-Bo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4iltd0wMlU played through http://vrplayer.codeplex.com/ are great examples.
Non-360 but wide-angle videos like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgox84KE7iY (spy-movie violence) still work pretty well (you can look around, just don't bother turning 360 degrees) and could be stereo.
Another factor is simulator sickness. Even if you could get the perfect 3D environment going (say via the Oculus Rift), your inner ear will start to complain that what it is seeing is not matching what it's feeling and your stomach will thinks its been poisoned and induce vomiting.
The only way '3D' will ever work is if the movie is jacked straight into your brain, ala 'Strange Days'.
As a big fan of the movie Strange Days, the effectiveness of plain-old-mpegs to deliver recorded first-person experiences that are replayable through the Rift was a wonderful surprise for me.
Here's my list of favorites so far:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eByvt8he58U&t=1m10s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXaxVLNMIxU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zaYrd0LvI
http://vimeo.com/64769947 NSFW
This is the beginning of the plot of the movie Strange Days. Essentially the ability to record the thoughts of people during extremely intimate periods of their lives. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/ It only took us 18 years to get to that point.
Suddenly this reminds me of "Strange Days", the movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
Strange Days - 1995.
Then take it few steps further with a 360 degree fish eye lense strapped to your forehead, and some sort of VR helmet display for playback. Then take the camera while skiing, mountain climbing etc., and you would essentially have a brainscanning device like in the movies Strange Days, or Brainscan.
Strange Days is another variation of the theme: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack