Subject: Review: Dark City (1998)

From: [email-masked] (Ram Samudrala)
Date: 14 Mar 1998 05:37:02 GMT

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			      DARK CITY
		    A film review by Ram Samudrala
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/Dark City/ offers one of the most compelling explanations as to what
happens when people are abducted by aliens.

The story begins when John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens without any
memory of his past, and is immediately forced to run from the police
who want him in connection with the murder of six prostitutes.
However, the police aren't the only ones who want him.  A group of
pale-faced long-overcoat wearing "Strangers" are also searching for
him. The Strangers turn out to be a race of aliens possessing a
collective consciousness (a la the Borg) who perform experiments on
the humans they have captured in an attempt to understand, and
eventually emulate, the human psyche. To this end, they plant memories
into their captives and see how the humans respond to lives that they
believe have lived all their lives, but are completely fictitious.

Thanks to the resilience of the human species, Murdoch manages to
evolve the ability to "tune", the same ability that enables the
Strangers to change the environment to suit each new experiment. This
makes him the only hope of salvation for the human prisoners and,
consequently, the biggest threat to the Strangers, since like them, he
too can make every thought become reality.

The main reason to see this movie is for the stunning visuals, which
complement the plot perfectly.  The film is done in classic comic book
style. It wouldn't have surprised me if words illustrating explosions
and fights started appearing on the screen.  Unlike many people, I
wasn't too impressed by the visuals in /The Crow/ or even /The Fifth
Element/, to cite a couple of recent examples.  But /Dark City/ is a
movie where the visuals went beyond my expectations.  The morphing
buildings themselves tell the tortured story of a collection of humans
whose very identities are mutated and changed by the Strangers the
same way the buildings are.

The plot is nothing original---it culls ideas from Star Trek (in fact,
a recent episode of /Star Trek: Voyager/ titled /The Killing Game/ had
a similar theme), /The Twilight Zone/, and /The Outer Limits/.  The
acting is good, and in particular, Kiefer Sutherland is great as
creepy doctor who adds an artistic touch to the Strangers'
experiments.  This is a movie worth watching on the big screen and I
highly recommend it.

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