Subject: Review: Dark City (1998)

From: Curtis Edmonds <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Mar 1998 05:17:52 GMT

by Curtis Edmonds -- [email-masked]

The best thing -- in fact, the only good thing -- I can say about Dark
City is that it made me want to go see L.A. Confidential again.  Or go
rent Body Heat, to see William Hurt do some real noir.  Or even -- God
help me -- Palmetto.

Alex Proyas's new movie screams atmosphere.  I screamed, too, "Get me
out of this theater!"  New Line Cinema spent millions of dollars
creating the expressionistic film noir visuals and paying the actors,
and doesn't have any way to get it back.  I paid $4.25 for a matinee
screening and don't have any way to get my money back, either.

You'll hear a lot from other critics about the look and feel of this
movie.  I will admit that the cinematographers and costume designers and
set artists and CGI graphics geeks all worked hard to create a stunning,
nightmarish future world where it's always a late night in 1948,
complete with rotary phones and automats and fedoras. I've got news for
you fellows -- I don't care how hard you worked, or how visually
stunning this movie looks -- you wasted your time and mine, working on a
movie without a plot, without a clear sense of direction of where it
wanted to go, without a soul or a reason to care.

The movie starts out oh-so-promising.  John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) is
lying in a bathtub in the sort of seedy hotel that in real life, would
have been boarded up long ago.  There is a dead, mutilated prostitute in
the other room -- a surprise, as he has lost his memory.  The phone
rings:  it's a sinister-sounding man, claiming to be his doctor, telling
him to flee for his life.

All well and good, right?  Wrong.  Apparently, someone decided that the
audience was just a bit too dim to figure out the intricacies of the
plot.  (This is getting to be a popular assumption in Hollywood.)  So,
the actual beginning of the movie is not Sewell running for his life,
rather, it's a voice-over narration by the aforementioned doctor (Keifer
Sutherland) explaining exactly what is going on and who is responsible.
It's as though Sam the piano player had told us that Rick and Ilsa had
been getting it on in Paris in the first three minutes of Casablanca.
No, wait, that's not fair to Casablanca.  It's more like watching a new
plotline at the first of the show -- or if you want to know how I really
feel, having an off-screen narrator explain that Gilligan won't be
getting off the island in this episode.

>From here, the coherence of the plot goes down faster than (insert
Monica Lewinsky joke here).  The characters just wander around the city
aimlessly and bump into each other for no apparent reason, and that's
what moves the plot.  What we're left with is a string of unanswered
questions that don't make any sense.  We're given aliens with unlimited
omnipotent powers, yet they forget to use them at critical moments and
get themselves killed.  We're given a hero who can "tune" into these
same powers, yet he only uses them when it's convenient to the plot.
We're given a whole long list of loose ends that go nowhere

Usually, critics will say that an actor playing an underwritten part
"isn't given much to do."  In this movie, no one is given anything to
do.  Sewell is given the impossible role of a man who doesn't remember
anything, and plays it like... um... a man who doesn't remember
anything.  The aliens are tall, pasty-faced, and bald, and wear long
black cloaks and fedoras to remind us that they're evil -- and there's a
child alien as well, straight out of an Anne Rice novel.  Sutherland is
saddled with a limp, a twitchy eye, and a breathy accent to remind us
that he's in league with the aliens.

To its credit, Dark City boasts two impressive bits of casting.  William
Hurt is perfectly cast as the world-weary inspector charged with
catching the man who is murdering prostitutes all over the city.
Jennifer Connelly, playing Sewell's love interest, is given two
all-too-brief moments on screen as a lounge singer -- and turns in the
sexiest performace this side of Jessica Rabbit.  But instead of the
dogged policeman and the femme fatale given central treatment in the
script (the way they would be in any self-respecting noir movie) they're
almost tangiential to the plot, such as it is.

The problem with Dark City is this:  it's a bad science fiction movie
pretending to be film noir.  The essence of film noir isn't, as Proyas
seems to beleive, breathy dialogue or snap-brim fedoras or tall, bald
evil villains who would make Peter Lorre curl up in a corner.  Dark City
has not one bit of intrigue, moral ambiguity, suspense, or anything else
that keeps us coming back to the noir classics.

Dark City is like the intricately carved door that Kate Winslet floats
on in Titanic.  It's an exceptionlly well-made and intricately designed
piece of flotsam, sailing around and around the middle of the ocean,
going nowhere.

Rating:  C-

--
Curtis "BlueDuck" Edmonds
[email-masked]

The Hollywood Stock Brokerage and Resource
http://www.hsbr.org/brokers/blueduck/