Dark City (1998) 103m.
I'm reluctant to put my thoughts of this film into writing. My immediate impression of DARK CITY after viewing it is….well, an immediate impression. It works like a dream: you dream something, you wake up with it vividly in your memory, a couple of hours later you remember its non-submersible images or emotions, a couple of days later its impact is almost completely gone. Right now it has been three hours since I watched DARK CITY, and already its hypnopompic residue is settling somewhere in a dark, limbic city of my own. That's fine by me. I don't want to go poking around in there just for the sake of analysis.
But it's safe enough to recount the fundamentals: This is writer-director Alex Proyas' followup to THE CROW (which in itself could have been titled DARK CITY). Its most striking feature, like its predecessor, is its sepulchral photography, although DARK CITY may be even darker (but at least without all that rain): it seems that every wall is painted black or grey, every shadow overwhelms the light sources within the frame, every character is etched in chiaroscuro. It's not just a noir gimmick. Like the startling visual effects, the look of the film is entirely in service with its storyline: the titular city is part machine, part terrarium, part psychoid unconscious. It's as Jung would have dreamed it himself - a place where the basic stories of our world might begin with a singular creative experience.
The city's governorship is in the hands of powerful beings known only as The Strangers (imagine a costume party where everyone shows up as Nosferatu and you'll get the basic idea), who impose mandatory hibernation periods upon its human residents. It's when one of the citizens (Rufus Sewell) remains awake that the film begins. Thenceforth a lot of strange stuff happens in DARK CITY, and Proyas stretches out the intrigue for just the right length. Its arresting visuals and thundering soundtrack - this film must be heard in a cinema, not just seen in one - drive its narrative at a compelling pace, although the purely cinematic sensibility of it all makes Sewell and the other actors hardly memorable; only Keifer Sutherland's mannered performance stands out afterwards, for better or worse.
The most noticeable thing about DARK CITY is that it makes perfect sense as an experience, but not as a story. Here we have an alien gestalt capable of manifesting its consciousness; for all intents and purposes they appear invulnerable. Yet they may be felled by a blow to the head just as easily as any of the humans in their charge. As a friend of mine remarked, if the aliens had this kind of power then why didn't they arm themselves with psychically-generated rocket launchers instead of their less effective psychically-generated knives? It's a fair point, and one which in turn leads to many other questions about the screenplay. But it would do just as well to question why, in a dream, you see yourself flattened under a truck loaded with baked beans only to be relocated in front of a classroom of talking raccoons a split second later (this may be a stupid example, but at least it's a real dream). Putting it plainly, to question the logic of this film is simply unsporting. Pick at one loose thread and you'll find that the story's entire fabric is made entirely of the same. Nevertheless, Proyas makes the bold choice of establishing the feel of a 1940s detective movie, thus providing us with characters that are investigating his project's own meaning. Admirable, when you realize it would have been a lot simpler for him to take a leaf out of David Lynch's book and cite the illogicality of dreams as his nightmarish film's raison d'etre.
When I was a kid I used to drive myself crazy thinking about the universe - how big it was, where it ended, if it ended, what it was in when it ended (a bubble, maybe? If so, what was the bubble floating in?). There were times when DARK CITY reminded me of that feeling. It's a metanarrative intrigue into those huge creative spaces: the fabrication of storylines and scenarios, the endless possibilities and invention of characters and their relationships. We're outside looking in, but at the same time there's a sense that this film has come from somewhere within and is projecting itself out. It's easy to backtrack and point out a film history from which DARK CITY may have emerged - its seething architecture is mindful of BRAZIL and BLADE RUNNER, its existential vogue is similar to early Lars von Trier or Jeunet and Caro, etc, etc - but this kind of cross-referencing can go on forever. I've resisted temptation to draw parallels this time around. Let's face it, the only necessary base for comparison is much more primal: namely, our own dark cities. You know the ones. Just like in the film, they're torn down and rebuilt every night in our sleep.
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