Subject: Review: Dark City (1998)

From: Kevin Patterson <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Mar 1998 06:38:24 GMT

Film review by Kevin Patterson 

DARK CITY
Rating: *** (out of four)
R, 1998
Directed by Alex Proyas. Written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer.
Starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt. 

DARK CITY certainly boasts one of the more interesting premises of any recent
science fiction movie: a race of powerful aliens, in an attempt to discover
what constitutes the human soul, abduct a group of people and take them to an
artificially constructed "city." Every time it turns midnight, they are all
put to "sleep" while their memories are extracted, mixed, and redistributed;
meanwhile, the city itself is redone completely as entire buildings appear and
disappear through the aliens' "tuning," the term they use for their
manipulations of physical reality. They wake up in new places with new
memories and personal histories. Assisting them in these experiments is Dr.
Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a human scientist who helps the aliens as they
search for any indication that someone's individual essence might withstand
the constant brain-scrambling. 

As DARK CITY begins, we learn that something has just gone wrong with the
aliens' experiment. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) has had his memory wiped as
expected, but the implantation of new memories seems to have failed. He is
left with no identity and, more importantly, no idea what he's doing in a
hotel room with the bloody corpse of a dead prostitute. Before long, both the
"police" that the aliens have brought to the city as well as the aliens
themselves are after him as he tries to figure out who he is and whether or
not he is responsible for the woman's murder. Along the way, the aliens
discover that he is able to "tune" in the same way that they can and begin to
think that he may be the answer to their questions about human individuality.
It's an idea that occurs to the audience as well, as Murdoch does seem to
retain a certain high moral character despite the memory loss; as the
sympathetic Police Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) notes, he doesn't seem
like a murderer, whatever the evidence against him. 

Writer/director Proyas does a wonderful job in creating the experimental city:
it is a place filled with towering skyscrapers, dark alleys, and ugly yellow
and neon-green interiors. The sun never rises (literally, since the aliens
can't stand the light), leaving everyone trapped in what seems like perpetual
and unabated gloom. It is perhaps fortunate for the human subjects that the
aliens reset everyone's memory after a day; I have no doubt that I would lose
my mind after consciously spending more than about a week in this place. This
nightmarish atmosphere is perfectly suited to the story, immersing the
audience in the same sense of paranoia that Murdoch feels as he tries to
convince himself of his own innocence and seeks the sympathy of his supposed
wife (Jennifer Connelly) and Bumstead. Proyas adds plenty of clever touches to
add to Murdoch's frustration as he looks for answers. At one point, for
example, he asks someone what train will take him out of the city, to which
the person responds, "You want the express." He waits for the express, only to
see it fly past him without stopping; when he asks another bystander why it
didn't stop, the man casually explains, "That's the express." 

Unfortunately, DARK CITY is weakened by a rushed and incomplete ending that
ignores a major plot element (and in a way that lends itself to truly eerie
implications - see below for spoilers) as Proyas, like any sensible Hollywood
director, decides that since he's put together these impressive sets and
visual designs, he might as well blow them up before he's finished. In the
process, he leaves us with quite a few lingering questions. Do *all* humans
have a "soul" to speak of, or just Murdoch (since he can "tune") and the other
few who are able to resist the aliens? Why are the aliens so sloppy with their
experiment as to leave everyone with only vague and confused understandings of
their present situation - didn't they realize people would get antsy when they
couldn't even figure out how to leave the city? Why do all of them have names
like "Mr. Hand", "Mr. Book", and "Mr. Quick"? Why did they design the city
like something out of a 1940s noir film? And if they're advanced enough to
manipulate physical reality, couldn't they have found some way around their
intolerance of light and thus avoided another dead giveaway for anyone who got
suspicious? 

The answer for some of these questions, of course, is probably that Proyas
shares the fascination of several of his contemporaries, such as Tim Burton,
with this Gothic comic-book atmosphere and visual design. (If that's the case,
however, he could have taken lessons from Burton, who in the BATMAN films
managed to create unease and dread even in broad daylight, and solved at least
one of his plot holes.) That's not to say that these dark, gloomy images are
wasted: they come through with a definite visceral power that puts DARK CITY
only one shelf below Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL and David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY in
the library of Psychologically Disturbing Films. But unlike those films, which
rested on a subjective, mind's-eye viewpoint, DARK CITY seems to have
underlying explanations which, while they may be science fiction, fit into the
framework of linear narrative. Once Proyas has chosen this expository
technique, the narrative demands that he follow through on it completely, and
he doesn't. 

Proyas seems to have quite a gift for haunting, atmospheric filmmaking; the
visual design and direction in DARK CITY are second to none. Perhaps once he
finds a top-notch screenplay, he will join the ranks of Burton, Gilliam, and
others as a first-rate fantasy filmmaker. Until then, DARK CITY still holds
its own as a refreshingly bizarre and original film that is sure to please
fans of science fiction or of psychological thrillers. 

- - - -SPOILER WARNING (Do not read further unless you want the ending and
other plot points revealed)- - - - 

Perhaps the biggest problem with DARK CITY is the final sequence in which
Murdoch has gained control over the aliens' technology and uses it to
re-"tune" the city so that now there is daylight, people can leave the city
and go to the beach, etc. Isn't he even going to *try* to pilot the city,
which has turned out to be a spaceship, back to Earth? What about recovering
everyone's original memory? Schreber apparently couldn't do this, but
presumably the aliens kept records of who everyone was before all this
started, or else they flunked high school lab science on their home planet. It
would have been fine for the screenplay to address these questions at the end
but not answer them, but instead it ignores them altogether. 

Moreover, is this really a "happy" ending, as its upbeat tone seems to
suggest? If it is, it potentially subverts whatever message the film was
trying to convey. No one else but Murdoch seems to know what's happened. Is
everything OK simply because the mutable city is now in the hands of a
supposedly more benevolent overlord, i.e. Murdoch? Seems to me like we're
right back where we started - a group of alien abductees is trapped in an
artificial reality controlled by a powerful being with the ability to "tune"
reality. Now, I don't really think this was Proyas's intention, but he should
have been more careful. 

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