Four Play

In 1995, a film predicted POV recording technology, VR experiences you can buy on the black market, deepfake manipulation, police brutality caught on camera, and a society addicted to experiencing other people's lives through a screen. It starred Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and was written by James Cameron. Almost nobody saw it.

 

Strange Days bombed at the box office, nearly destroyed Kathryn Bigelow's career, and has been virtually impossible to find ever since, as right now no streaming service carries it. But everything it warned us about has come true, and somehow the reality is worse than the fiction.

 

MonteCristo, Thorin, and Richard Lewis make the case for why this is one of the most important sci-fi films ever made. We get into the SQUID tech that directly inspired Cyberpunk 2077's Braindances, the darkest plot device in sci-fi, Ralph Fiennes as the perfect cyberpunk noir anti-hero, Angela Bassett's tragically wasted career as an action star, the Rodney King and OJ parallels baked into the script, and a long conversation about how AI, social media, and surveillance culture have made this film more relevant than ever.

 

Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars in 1995 and called it a future cult classic. He was right. Again.

 

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Four film lovers revisit The Matrix (1999) for the first time in years.

 

The action still holds up. The philosophical ideas still land. But the script? That's where things get complicated. We break down the Hong Kong cinema influences Hollywood never credited, the Dark City and Invisibles connections, what Keanu Reeves actually brings to Neo, and whether the Wachowskis wrote a cyberpunk masterpiece or got carried by everyone around them.

 

Plus: our 10-point rating and the one scene that still divides the room.

 

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Was The Matrix the first film to ask whether our reality is manufactured? No! There are huge parallels between Dark City and The Matrix, with both films using some of the same themes, visuals, and even sets.
 
In this episode of Four Play, we dive into Dark City (1998): Alex Proyas’ noir-drenched sci-fi cult classic that arrived one year before The Matrix and explored memory, identity, and control in ways that still feel unsettlingly modern.
 
Is Dark City just a forgotten cyberpunk curiosity or is it one of the most important science fiction films of the 1990s?

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Four Play begins a brand-new Cyberpunk Arc with a deep dive into Blade Runner: one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made.
 
Released in 1982, Blade Runner didn’t just define cyberpunk aesthetics,  it also reshaped how cinema explores identity, consciousness, artificial intelligence, capitalism, and what it means to be human. Decades later, its themes feel more relevant than ever.
 
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David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is not an adaptation: it’s a psychological autopsy.
 
In this episode of Four Play, we dive deep into one of the most challenging films ever released by a major director: Cronenberg’s surreal, disturbing, and deeply personal interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ life and work.
 
Rather than translating Burroughs’ famously “unfilmable” novel to the screen, Naked Lunch fuses biography, addiction, sexuality, guilt, and creativity into a dream-logic nightmare that feels closer to a hallucination than a movie.
 
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