Film review by Kevin Patterson
DARK CITY Rating: *** (out of four) R, 1998 Directed by Alex Proyas. Written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer. Starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt.
DARK CITY certainly boasts one of the more interesting premises of any recent science fiction movie: a race of powerful aliens, in an attempt to discover what constitutes the human soul, abduct a group of people and take them to an artificially constructed "city." Every time it turns midnight, they are all put to "sleep" while their memories are extracted, mixed, and redistributed; meanwhile, the city itself is redone completely as entire buildings appear and disappear through the aliens' "tuning," the term they use for their manipulations of physical reality. They wake up in new places with new memories and personal histories. Assisting them in these experiments is Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a human scientist who helps the aliens as they search for any indication that someone's individual essence might withstand the constant brain-scrambling.
As DARK CITY begins, we learn that something has just gone wrong with the aliens' experiment. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) has had his memory wiped as expected, but the implantation of new memories seems to have failed. He is left with no identity and, more importantly, no idea what he's doing in a hotel room with the bloody corpse of a dead prostitute. Before long, both the "police" that the aliens have brought to the city as well as the aliens themselves are after him as he tries to figure out who he is and whether or not he is responsible for the woman's murder. Along the way, the aliens discover that he is able to "tune" in the same way that they can and begin to think that he may be the answer to their questions about human individuality. It's an idea that occurs to the audience as well, as Murdoch does seem to retain a certain high moral character despite the memory loss; as the sympathetic Police Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) notes, he doesn't seem like a murderer, whatever the evidence against him.
Writer/director Proyas does a wonderful job in creating the experimental city: it is a place filled with towering skyscrapers, dark alleys, and ugly yellow and neon-green interiors. The sun never rises (literally, since the aliens can't stand the light), leaving everyone trapped in what seems like perpetual and unabated gloom. It is perhaps fortunate for the human subjects that the aliens reset everyone's memory after a day; I have no doubt that I would lose my mind after consciously spending more than about a week in this place. This nightmarish atmosphere is perfectly suited to the story, immersing the audience in the same sense of paranoia that Murdoch feels as he tries to convince himself of his own innocence and seeks the sympathy of his supposed wife (Jennifer Connelly) and Bumstead. Proyas adds plenty of clever touches to add to Murdoch's frustration as he looks for answers. At one point, for example, he asks someone what train will take him out of the city, to which the person responds, "You want the express." He waits for the express, only to see it fly past him without stopping; when he asks another bystander why it didn't stop, the man casually explains, "That's the express."
Unfortunately, DARK CITY is weakened by a rushed and incomplete ending that ignores a major plot element (and in a way that lends itself to truly eerie implications - see below for spoilers) as Proyas, like any sensible Hollywood director, decides that since he's put together these impressive sets and visual designs, he might as well blow them up before he's finished. In the process, he leaves us with quite a few lingering questions. Do *all* humans have a "soul" to speak of, or just Murdoch (since he can "tune") and the other few who are able to resist the aliens? Why are the aliens so sloppy with their experiment as to leave everyone with only vague and confused understandings of their present situation - didn't they realize people would get antsy when they couldn't even figure out how to leave the city? Why do all of them have names like "Mr. Hand", "Mr. Book", and "Mr. Quick"? Why did they design the city like something out of a 1940s noir film? And if they're advanced enough to manipulate physical reality, couldn't they have found some way around their intolerance of light and thus avoided another dead giveaway for anyone who got suspicious?
The answer for some of these questions, of course, is probably that Proyas shares the fascination of several of his contemporaries, such as Tim Burton, with this Gothic comic-book atmosphere and visual design. (If that's the case, however, he could have taken lessons from Burton, who in the BATMAN films managed to create unease and dread even in broad daylight, and solved at least one of his plot holes.) That's not to say that these dark, gloomy images are wasted: they come through with a definite visceral power that puts DARK CITY only one shelf below Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL and David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY in the library of Psychologically Disturbing Films. But unlike those films, which rested on a subjective, mind's-eye viewpoint, DARK CITY seems to have underlying explanations which, while they may be science fiction, fit into the framework of linear narrative. Once Proyas has chosen this expository technique, the narrative demands that he follow through on it completely, and he doesn't.
Proyas seems to have quite a gift for haunting, atmospheric filmmaking; the visual design and direction in DARK CITY are second to none. Perhaps once he finds a top-notch screenplay, he will join the ranks of Burton, Gilliam, and others as a first-rate fantasy filmmaker. Until then, DARK CITY still holds its own as a refreshingly bizarre and original film that is sure to please fans of science fiction or of psychological thrillers.
- - - -SPOILER WARNING (Do not read further unless you want the ending and other plot points revealed)- - - -
Perhaps the biggest problem with DARK CITY is the final sequence in which Murdoch has gained control over the aliens' technology and uses it to re-"tune" the city so that now there is daylight, people can leave the city and go to the beach, etc. Isn't he even going to *try* to pilot the city, which has turned out to be a spaceship, back to Earth? What about recovering everyone's original memory? Schreber apparently couldn't do this, but presumably the aliens kept records of who everyone was before all this started, or else they flunked high school lab science on their home planet. It would have been fine for the screenplay to address these questions at the end but not answer them, but instead it ignores them altogether.
Moreover, is this really a "happy" ending, as its upbeat tone seems to suggest? If it is, it potentially subverts whatever message the film was trying to convey. No one else but Murdoch seems to know what's happened. Is everything OK simply because the mutable city is now in the hands of a supposedly more benevolent overlord, i.e. Murdoch? Seems to me like we're right back where we started - a group of alien abductees is trapped in an artificial reality controlled by a powerful being with the ability to "tune" reality. Now, I don't really think this was Proyas's intention, but he should have been more careful.
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