DARK CITY
USA/Australia. 1998. Director/Story - Alex Proyas, Screenplay - Proyas, Lem Dobbs & David S. Goyer, Producers - Goyer & Andrew Mason, Photography - Dariusz Wolski, Music - Trevor Jones, Visual Effects - Mason, Mara Bryan & Arthur Windus, Digital Visual Effects - DFilm Services, Sydney, Model/Miniature Supervisor - Tom Davies, Special Effects Supervisor - Tad Price, Prosthetics - Bob McCarron, Production Design - George Liddle & Patrick Tatopoulos. Production Company - Mystery Clock/Dark City Productions/New Line Cinema. Rufus Sewell (John Murdoch), Kiefer Sutherland (Dr Daniel Poe Schreber), William Hurt (Inspector Frank Bumstead), Jennifer Connelly (Emma Murdoch/Anna), Ian Richardson (Mr Book), Richard O'Brien (Mr Hand), John Bluthal (Karl Harris), Bruce Spence (Mr Wall), Colin Friels (Detective Walenski), Melissa George (May)
Plot: In a mysterious city where the sunlight never shines, John Murdoch wakes in a hotel room with no memory of who he is. He is pursued by police who suspect that he is responsible for a series of killings of prostitutes; a creepy doctor who insists that he is insane; and mysterious aliens in black coats and fedoras who place the entire city to sleep on the stroke of midnight while they manipulate its fundamental structure. However Murdoch finds he is the only person who can not be made to sleep by the aliens and that he shares some of their reality-manipulating abilities. In his efforts to understand the situation, he comes to discover that the entire city is a vast laboratory being used in experiments by the aliens to reorder and transplant people's memories in an attempt to penetrate the secret of the human soul.
Forget about what Variety and a number of the other trained-monkey mainstream reviewers have said about 'Dark City' being confusing and hard to follow. I can say without any hesitation that this is one of the most conceptually audacious and best sf films I have seen in the last few years.
It is the second film of Alex Proyas, who made a striking debut with the darkly driven and nihilistic 'The Crow' in 1994. The film is clearly a very personal project of Proyas's - he also had a strong hand in the script - and marks him as one of the directors most worth keeping an eye on in future. It is a film that eludes any easy pigeonholing. It seemingly takes place in a world of self-conscious artifice that suggests a collision between 'Brazil' and 'The Maltese Falcon'. Here Proyas deliberately evokes film noir - everyone dresses in trench coats and hats, the women come across as slinky vamps, the cars are all period and the technology has a striking 1940s retro look. (The city was built entirely stagebound inside Australia's Movie World studios). But there is also a dystopian feel to it too - there are times the film is extraordinarily threatening - a visit to a cafe where each item of food sits in a compartment of its own in a backlit glass case is striking. Proyas shoots it all in a beautiful, virtually monochrome lighting scheme that renders the city as permanent night-time - one where the recurrent vision of a sunlit, palm-shaded beach (even when it is revealed as only a faded mural) becomes an achingly palpable representation of all hope.
Of course in this noir world everything is far from normal. In an almost classical setup the hero wakes in a hotel room with complete amnesia and to find himself on the run from the police as a suspected killer. But then in the first of the film's wild spins finds he is immune to (and maybe even one of) a group of bald aliens beneath the city who on the stroke of midnight each night cause the populace to fall asleep while they rearrange the spatial geometry and the very fabric of reality within the city. After several wild (but completely logical) twists the hero makes a classical conceptual breakthrough to discover that the city is an experiment set up by the aliens to determine the nature of the human soul by manipulating and transplanting people's memories. One of the most emotionally powerful scenes in the film comes when he tries to explain to his wife that the memories of their marriage are entirely false and were only implanted the previous night, only to have her tearfully protest "But they can't be - I love you." An extraordinary film.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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