# [film] "Dark City" A Postview, copyright 1998 p-m agapow
In grand pulp tradition, a man (Sewell) wakes up amnesiac in a hotel room with a dead woman. Terrified he flees into the shadowy city, pursued by a puzzled cop (Hurt), his supposed wife (Connelly) and a group of mysterious figures cloaked in black, none of whom have Australian accents. There's a deranged doctor (Sutherland) in there too.
The pursued amnesiac murderer is an oldie but a goodie, a hook around which one could build a tight and twisty plot. But that's not what happens here. The most mysterious thing about "Dark City", is why the plot starts shrouded in such mystery and then so easily gives up its secrets to lumber into a comic book action plot. Was this intentional or has the writer and director (Alex "The Crow" Proyas) misjudged his audience? I suspect the second, but let's look at the good things first. (As always with mystery films, one must speak elliptically on certain plot points so as to preserve the surprise for viewers - even if the filmmakers don't find the surprise useful.)
>From the opening scenes, Proyas' visual style draws you in. Our hero awakes in a bathtub, the camera drinking in a lazily swinging naked lightbulb, a syringe loose on an intricately tiled floor, a bundle of clothes folded loosely on a chair. Later, we move through the Escher-like streets of the city to where a singer sways slowly in front of a microphone as her band plays in the darkness just outside the spotlight. The dark city itself is a kind of painting, a composition carefully constructed for each shot. Indeed, the actors do not so much move through each scene as just stand carefully within them. Movement would disrupt the careful placement and so characters are more part of the scenery than part of the plot.
Although this objectifying of the cast is often bad, within "Dark City" it works. William Hurt as the laconic police lieutenant is playing little more than a cliche, but this cliche belongs here and is done very well. Likewise, Jennifer Connelly's role could best be described as "The Girl" and wouldn't go astray in dozens of other movies. Nor does it go astray here. Kiefer Sutherland, who was nearly due for lifetime membership in the Bad Movie Actors Guild (whether you read it as "BAD movie ACTORS" or "BAD MOVIE actors") here turns a surprisingly good job as the oddly pathetic collaborator Dr Schreber, struggling pathetically against his controllers.
But this returns us to the plot. The sad fact is that the mystery is all but over 40 minutes into the film, leaving nothing but the visual style. After the teasing open scene, the director is in a tearing hurry to explain it all to us, with a disastrous opening monologue which all but tells you what's going on. (Even one of the poster blurbs gives the secret away.) So by the halfway mark, the battle lines are drawn and all that remains is for our hero to go mano a mano with the bad guys. And you don't seriously think that he's going to lose, do you? This is mighty little to hang the rest of the film on. Actually it's surprising that Dark City works as well as it does given that thinness of its plot. Some viewers might complain that "Dark City" is illogical. Given the immense levels of technology and powers dealt with, it's more "a-logical". Anything could happen. It's more fantasy than science-fiction. This tends to underline the arbitrariness and lack of mystery.
"Dark City" is thus a bit of a mixed bag, the product of a single person's vision that perhaps needed some tempering by an outside point of view to bring it to full fruition. However, just on the basis of the first half and visuals I'd rate it [***/interesting] and Peter Greenaway on the Sid and Nancy scale.
"Dark City" (aka "Dark Empire", "Dark World") Released 1998. Director and writer Alex Proyas. Starring Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Ian Richardson, Kiefer Sutherland, Bruce Spence, Richard O'Brien, Colin Friels, John Bluthal, Melissa George.
-- Paul-Michael Agapow (p.agapow@ic.ac.uk), Dept. Biology, Imperial College "We were too young, lived too fast and had too much technology ..."
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