CLICK ON CAROLINE. Dear Caroline Film Reviews at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/7066
DARK CITY
Dear Caroline --
"Dark City" gave me a splitting headache, but one day later the movie makes less sense to me than it did when I watched it.
Director Alex Proyas' followup to the underrated "The Crow," is a loud, bulky, visual-effects laden mess of a movie. It's a cross between Stephen Soderbergh's "Kafka" and "Hellraiser: Bloodline" by legendary B-movie director Alan Smithee. At least, I think it was. "Dark City" made as much sense as "Spawn," and how could I ever forget the worst movie of 1997 since it is five months, 20 days and 14 hours since I've seen it?
Proyas should have brought Smithee in to finish "Dark City," but it appears he had too much invested in the convoluted story since it was his idea to begin with. He also co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced the movie.
How do I tell you about a movie that I didn't understand? It's films like "Dark City" that give science fiction movies a bad name. A mult-million dollar budget spent on a 10-cent script. "Dark City" is set in an unknown world, on an unknown planet in an unknown part of the galaxy. The city looks as dreary as Metropolis, or even futuristic L.A. from "Blade Runner," but there are no spaceships here. Only 1940s era Studebakers and elevated trains.
Even more is unknown about its citizens. How did they get there? Who are they? There is never any daylight and no one is quite sure of what the world is like outside the city. The script gives few details about any backstory, and that is Proyas' main downfall. Go ahead and spend tons of dough on George Liddle's production designs, but send this story back to re-write.
The film begins with an opening pan of the city stolen from the aforementioned "Metropolis."
Rufus Sewell ("Dangerous Beauty") stars, in his second film to open on the same day, as amnesia victim John Murdoch, who awakens from his bathtub to discover a dead woman in his hotel room. Murdoch becomes a suspect in a series of killings involving hookers. With a memory lapse lasting three weeks, Murdoch searches for his lounge singing wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly). He also has a strange mind power borrowed from "Dune," but that's never explained as well. Sewell's performance is clearly mailed-in as he seems to sleepwalk through much of the movie.
>From there, you're on your own as to understanding the rest of the plot. Check your brain at the door. "Dark City" joins a long list of films that make absolutely no sense, beginning with such recent story-impaired movies like "Mission:Impossible," "The Jackal," "Johnny Mnemonic" or "Destiny Turns on the Radio."
In "Dark City," the Strangers, a group of Pinhead wannabes, control the city from their underground lair. Each day (each half day?) they make time stop at the stroke of 12 so that they could change the buildings around in the city while everyone else is temporarily asleep. Ahem. Fine British actor Ian Richardson plays the boss, but he's not so fine here, barely recognizable in his Cenobite look-alike garb. His right-hand man, Mr. Hand (Richard O'Brien), is one of the ghouls that chases after Murdoch for no apparent reason.
The disfigured Dr. Daniel Schreber (Keifer Sutherland) acts as an agent between the city dwellers and the underground dwellers.
Oscar winner William Hurt, who disappeared from major studio films through much of the 90s, begins the year with the first of four movies. He starts off as the meaningless Inspector Bumstead. Bumstead is brought in to take over the serial hooker killings case, but that subplot is completely forgotten by the end. I don't get it. Hurt is trying to mount a comeback starting with "Dark City" and "Lost in Space?"
I just don't get it.
Rating: One star
Thinking of you, Geo. M. Wilcox
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