 A film in three minutes. Strange days. If you could re-experience your most precious memories, what would they be? Perhaps your first kiss? Or the day you proposed? Or maybe the birth of your child? Now what if you lived in a future where you could also relive other people's memories, such as their first robbery, or first assault, or first murder? Would you flee at the thought of knowing what they felt like? Or would the temptation to stare into this dark, cerebral abyss be too great? Because in the world of Catherine Bigelow's 1995 sci-fi thriller Strange Days, such possibilities can become reality. Set in a dystopian version of Los Angeles at the turn of the century, the story follows Lenny Nero, a former LAPD vice squad officer who now makes a living selling illegal squid or superconducting quantum interface device recordings on the black market. These recordings enable users to experience full sensory feedback from pre-recorded memories and physical sensations of other people, making them highly addictive. But when Lenny receives a mysterious recording showing a friend of his ex-girlfriend being murdered, his life is quickly turned upside down, exposing him to a conspiracy that reaches the upper echelons of the LAPD and wider society, forcing him and his bodyguard slash best friend Mace, played by Angela Bassett, to try and uncover the true identity of the killer. Produced by James Cameron, Bigelow's ex-husband, Strange Days incorporated new cinematography techniques in order to create the first-person perspective squid recordings offer. Cameron's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, created a special lightweight 35mm camera that could be fitted onto a portable steady camera to approximate the angle and distance of the human eye, adding tremendous intensity and realism to the several memory sequences in the film. The decision not to use any early CGI when visualising these scenes was a wise one and prevents the film from dating as badly as other 90s movies that dealt with similar themes on virtual reality. Paying tribute to the cyberpunk genre first coined by William Gibson, the film's atmosphere borrows heavily from works such as Blade Runner, presenting us with a richly lit neon LA that is on the brink of societal collapse, which was in turn inspired by the then recent LA riots of 1992. Undercurrent themes of racism, drug addiction and what it means to have a private life in an age of increasingly accessible voyeuristic technology elevate the film from other science fiction pieces released before the Matrix and have helped to cement Strange Days' reputation as a cult film. Despite a poor box office performance that almost derailed Bigelow's career, Strange Days' reputation has only grown in the years since release. Her pull-no-punches direction when dealing with some of the film's more graphic sequences, as well as the unorthodox casting of finds in the lead role, make the film stand apart from other sci-fi escapisms released during that decade. The film's warning about not becoming obsessed with the past is one that anyone with a smartphone can relate to, which of course in these Strange Days is most of us.