Despite deep, deep misgivings about "Dark City", from how bad the TV commericals look after the seriously cool theater trailers, and from word of mouth, I went to see the movie last night and was surprised. It didn't totally suck; it wasn't totally cheesy.
This is a science fiction/fantasy/horror film that aspires to art. The visions this film presents gets up there -- it's very pretty, with the fish being released into the water merely being the first of many elegant images -- but the writing fails here and there, and then breaks down completely near the end. The writers, whether through a failure of talent or through a cave-in to a producer's low opinion of the audience, try to explain everything in agonizing, repetitive detail, far worse than "Blade Runner" with the voice-over. Mysteries are solved and removed before they have a chance to be savored and revealed.
It's also not a completely original piece of work. The film concerns a man who wakes up in a hotel room, with his memories gone. It's an old plot, though, the twist here is to make his quest to regain memory into a meditation on the idea of memory and identity. Philip K. Dick has done this any number of times, usually better. While a less pretty and less serious film than "Dark City", the PKD inspired "Total Recall" perhaps makes for a better meditation on memory and identity if you ignore the Schwarzenneger pyrotechnics. We won't get into PKD's stories or the intensely literary and just-as-elegantly-shot "Blade Runner".
There are a few moments when the film wanders into stupidity, but generally not fatally. At one point, a character is informed of his god-like powers of shaping reality. He uses the powers to make a beach -- a lame one -- instead of, say, building temples and calling on the people to cast golden calves in his honor. (That's what I'd do. I suppose I shouldn't achieve god-like powers.) Oh, the god-like powers are expressed by a woo-woo-woo-woo rings coming from out of foreheads. Awe-inspiring, this isn't. Actually, thinking about it, I'm not sure how god-like the powers are, since the evil-people have them, and they work in labor-intensive ways, either in Dickensian infernal mills or as roadies in a mysterious rigging company. They also have to get very close to mere mortals in order to put them to sleep (in a less-lame-than-expected gesture of the hand and a slinkily spoken "sleep" -- it looked really good in the trailer, since you're hearing only industrial-like music, but looks really bad in the commercials since you can hear them talking)
The bad guys are "derivative" or "refers to", depending on if you're in a good mood or not. The Strangers seem to be inspired by the old silent film "Nosferatu". Except for pointy teeth, they're dead ringers for the first on-screen vampire, complete with bald head and out-of-proportion limbs. There is something deliciously creepy about these figures carrying knives and wearing cheerily malevolent smiles. Yes, some of the good photography in "Dark City" may be inspired by Expressionist films, though any movie scenes featuring tall, lean figures in the shadows may be references to that style.
The art design for the film -- the costumes, the cars, the props (which looked like models, actually) -- borrows from the 1930s, arguably the age of totalitarianism, though that wasn't made explicit (which, given how much they like to explain everything, was missed by the writers). The issues of identity and control certainly has totalitarian implications, though my main thought was, how did people in the 1930s avoid hat hair?
One question for the audience: when did clocks acquire mystical significance? The film's production company is in fact called "Mystery Clock" -- a good name -- but mechanical clocks didn't exist until a few hundred years ago. The idea of the mystery clock hasn't been with us forever. Cinderella focuses on the stroke of midnight, but when did this motif come about? The story is older than clocks.
Oh, one thing they might have done, which would've been cute, would've been to put a couple pair of elephants standing on a big turtle in a particular scene. You'll know which it is.
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