Dark City Is One Silly Town

The film:
Dark City (theatrical release in 1998 - this is a review of the 2008 Director's Cut)

The under-the-radar factor:
Box office receipts were fairly soft for this New Line Cinema effort on its theatrical run. Safe to say not a lot of eyeballs have laid eyes on this DC version. (It apparently features an absence of narration and a few scenes moved around.)

The review:

And you think you have trouble remembering things...

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub with blood spilling from a puncture in his forehead. Nearby is the body of a dead prostitute. What's up with that? - John has no idea. He has no recollection of how he got to this apartment, or, for that matter, any other memory. He doesn't even realize his name is John Murdoch until he finds the appropriate i.d. Soon enough he is informed that he is suppose to be married to a lounge singer named Emma (Jennifer Connelly), that he is the prime suspect in a string of murders involving other call girls which Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is looking into, and that he is being chased by some really weird looking characters who look like relatives of Nosferatu (They're called "The Strangers"...ooh, scary, huh kids?). The one person who appears to be really capable of helping John - or betraying him - is the geeky shrink Daniel P. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) who supplies him with some information, but is obviously also holding back on a lot of other very important details. And then there are the constant references to Shell Beach - a place everyone has heard about but no one seems to remember how to get to.

Murdoch is eventually able to piece this much together... 1) the metropolis he's in stays in darkness and never sees daylight, 2) the inhabitants of this artificial excuse of a city regularly go through a process where they fall asleep and then identities are switched with new memories planted in their heads (this is called "tuning" - one day you're a down-and-outer - the next you're a filthy rich aristocrat) and, most importantly, 3) Murdoch seems to possess the same supernatural powers that the evil ones pursuing him have.



Dark City had a lot going for it at the time of it's theatrical release. Director/Co-Writer Alex Proyas was coming off his rather mesmerizing Brandon Lee vehicle The Crow. A pretty well known dude named Roger Ebert stepped up as a major cheerleader for the flick. The times seemed right with the table being set for other movies with similar visual panache like The Matrix. So...?

One of the major problems with this film is the porn-type approach to its art direction/cinematography  - one stunning visual "money shot" after another eventually becomes boring and then irritating. The movie seems to exist more for the excuse to blast as many spectacular images as it can, instead of being there to tell a coherent and involving story on the topics of identity and the like. And in case you didn't see the landscape of the city being profoundly changed the first time, relax...it happens over and over again... and then some. Dark City comes across as a collection of outakes that even Terry Gilliam thought were too much and ended up in a never ending loop, ad nauseum. In the spirit of making sure everything in this production is ridiculously overdone, the so-called battle scenes between the characters have the kind of hyper qualities Vince McMahon would be proud of.

It also doesn't help that Sewell is in a bit over his head and doesn't really have the range needed for his role, that Sutherland's grade-B Peter Lorre bits aren't always up to snuff, and that Hurt spends much of the time apparently trying to stay awake. Connelly is there as lovely set dressing and not much more.

As far as visually excessive cinematic experiences go, the neo-noir sci-fi Dark City isn't nearly as bad a film as Juan Solanas' wretched Upside Down ...but that's like saying the six dollar bottle of wine was better than the four dollar one. With movies, as with wino, save your pennies for the good stuff. It ain't here.