Dark City (1998)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

83. Dark City (1998)

 

"First came darkness, then came the Strangers."

n Dr. Daniel P. Schreber

 

SF,F&H has a long history of stories influenced by René Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy” (first published 1641), in which he proposed that an Evil Demon, of "utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me," creates perfect illusion so "I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things."

 

Tale-after-tale related to this have offered us Demons, Mad Scientists, Cults, and Tyrannical Governments, which trap us in false realities for usually Vampiric motives, and at least half the time, the goal is to steal our dreams.

 

A striking element of films that play with these ideas is they tend to un-self-consciously evoke one-another. This film bluntly, visually, refers to Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “The City of Lost Children” (1995), even though there are significant plot differences. Then this film’s plot was largely recycled for Wachowskis’ “The Matrix” (1999), even though “The Matrix” went down a very different path visually. This is not meant as a criticism of any of them, nor any of the many other films sharing the same intellectual playground, it is merely an observation that they are in conversation with each other about a shared, existential, paranoia.

 

These have always popular themes in SF,F&H, but narratives focusing on the questioning the nature of Reality and Identity seemed to especially dominate the cinema of the 1990s. The same year as “Dark City” we also saw “The Truman Show,” “Open You Eyes,” and the Rom-Com, “Sliding Doors” which wasn’t SF, but did mix some SF tropes into is eccentric story-structure. The next year, 1999, “Open Your Eyes” was released in the English-speaking world and the theaters were dominated by the “Matrix,” these proved to be only two players in an even larger crowd.  

 

Director Alex Proyas first displayed his love of hyper-stylized Noir with the cursed, but also hugely successful, production of “The Crow” (1994). He returned that milieu with this picture, which he Wrote with Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer, choosing to draw us into his highly bizarre narrative via a classic Hard-Boiled Detective setup.

 

When we’re introduced to the Hero, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), he doesn’t even know what his name is. He wakes with amnesia in a hotel bathtub and finds a beautiful woman lying brutally murdered in the bed. The phone rings, he picks up, and a stranger, Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), warns him people are after him. Thus begins John’s odyssey, hunted by the Police as a murder suspect, also hunted by other more nefarious Villains, all-the-while trying to piece together what actually happened. The film diverges from a traditional Noir in that the solution to the mystery requires the complete unraveling of what John perceives as physical reality.

 

This complicated and ambitious film was difficult to sell to a studio; Proyas was working on the project since 1990, but didn’t have adequate support to hire the two more experienced Screenwriters until after “The Crow’s” success. Even then, it passed through three studios before entering production. Though Proyas is Australian and filmed in his own country, the $40 million (USD) budget required financing from the USA (in most countries, $40 million is staggering, in the USA in the late 1990s, it was barely above mid-level). After its completion, it tested badly, so the final studio, New Line, pressured Proyas to a provide a now-much-complained-about voice-over introduction by Daniel and showing an impressive sequence of the City surreally remolding itself which was originally supposed to be at the end of the film; these two things gave away much of the mystery away before it was introduced. “Dark City” then under-preformed in the box-office, but was declared the Best Film of 1998 by Critic Roger Ebert, and quickly developed a Cult-following. When the studio re-released it in 2008, the original cut was restored.

 

Since the studio gave the audience spoilers, there’s no reason for me not to. What’s going on in this twisty tale is that ignorant Humanity is trapped on a Generation Starship by the Strangers, a cadre of pale-faced, trench-coat-clad, reanimated corpses, representing a dying Alien Hive Mind. The Hive Mind needs to capture the essence of what it is to be Human in order to save themselves, and are experimenting on the Humans, and rewriting everyone’s identity nightly to further that goal. Not only do the Prisoners not know they are Prisoners, each morning they wake up believing they are a new person with no memory of who they were the day before.  Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) explains, “We fashioned this City on stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one. Each night we revise it, refine it in order to learn . . . about you . . . what makes you human. We need to be like you.”

 

Daniel is almost the only human that understands this, but he’s been forced into the employ of the Strangers. Now, he’s manipulating John to further his own plan to take revenge on his Secret Masters and free himself, and everyone else, from this Slavery.

 

The role in the story of the dead woman in the hotel room concerns one of the Strangers, Mr. Wall (Bruce Spence), you see, the Strangers consider John the culmination of their experiments, so Wall is injected with John’s fake memories in hopes that this would aide in hunting down, but something goes wrong, probably because of Daniel’s deliberate intervention, and Wall becomes a Serial Killer with a fetish for prostitutes. Or perhaps those were the correct memories, maybe John was a Serial Killer yesterday, and maybe the first dead woman was actually John’s victim because even John doesn’t know who he was yesterday.

 

The look is as heavily-influenced by Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) as it is by “City of Lost…,” so much so that more Critics cited the Lang example more often than the Caro/Jeunet. (Regarding a different film, another Director, Bong Joon-ho, proclaimed that, "Perhaps for every Sci-fi director we all live inside the boundaries that Lang created.") Another film it’s compared to is Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), in part because of the mixture of Noir and SF, in part because of the studio’s insistence on including over-explaining narrations that all-but-required later, re-edited, Special Edition releases. 

 

Films with ideas like this kicking around in them are usually set in a VR Universe, but this fabricated and ever-morphing City is a physical place, something Proyas revels in both visually and in the plot details. Improbabilities, like Daniel personally, nightly, injecting new personalities via syringe in every inhabitant of the City, are accepted casually because they are so integrated in the texture of the environment.

 

The physicality of the illusion effected the visual texture more than the plotting, but that choice makes the film much more sinister than, let’s say, “The Matrix.” It is reflected in Proyas’ decision to rely on practical effects and miniatures more than CGI, though the use of CGI was still extensive and considered groundbreaking in the context of Australian film productions. Critic Roger Ebert called attention to Pyros’ background in music videos, “His film shows the obsessive concentration on visual detail that's the hallmark of directors who make films that are short and expensive.” The Cinematography by Dariusz Wolski is gorgeous, feeding directly off the moodiness of the Production Designer by Patrick Tatopoulos and George Liddle. Tatopoulos had done Proyas’ FX on “The Crow” and many of the same techniques were used in both pictures. Sarah L. Higley described it a "murky, nightmarish German expressionist film noir depiction of urban repression and mechanism … buildings collapse as others emerge and battle with one another at the end."

 

Tatopoulos himself stated, “The movie takes place everywhere, and it takes place nowhere. It's a city built of pieces of cities. A corner from one place, another from someplace else. So, you don't really know where you are. A piece will look like a street in London, but a portion of the architecture looks like New York, but the bottom of the architecture looks again like a European city. You're there, but you don't know where you are. It's like every time you travel, you'll be lost.”

 

The visual aspect of the film drew raves. Andrew Urban, "[T]here exists a swirling pool of visions which are fantastic and splendid even if at times they are incomprehensible." Louise Keller promised that it "settles and filters through the subconscious until we are immersed in this dark and mysterious world." Paul Fischer is a "feast of stylized images, blended together in a remarkable and original fusion."

 

A consistent visual motif are spirals, and much is made of “Shell Beach” a vacation resort that all know of, but no one can remember how to get to. Shell Beach connects to the spirals because when riding on public transportation to get there, you just go in circles. Insane ex-Cop Eddie Walenski (Colin Friels) seems to have understand the significance of the spiral as he’s adorned his hovel with them. And all the victims of the Serial Killer, no matter who’s doing the killing that particular evening, have spirals carved in them.

 

Meanwhile, in his amnesiac confusion, John has at least a glimmer of a chance of rediscovering a core identity, whoever he was before the Stranger’s started toying with him. He knows (or feels) he needs to reunite with the woman he loved before; this woman will eventually prove to be Emma Murdoch (Jennifer Connelly), also referred to as Anna, and maybe a million other names, but early in the film, he doesn’t remember who she is, he only has a faith that she exists.

 

Emma proves to be a beautiful torch-song singer in a smokey room, and her first dialogue with John establishes the film’s Romanticism:

 

John: "Everything you remember, and everything I'm supposed to remember, never really happened."

Emma: "I so vividly remember meeting you [because of the experiments, she should see this as their first meeting] … I remember falling in love with you … I love you, John. You can't fake something like that."

John: "No, you can't."

 

The cast is damn good at expressing the impossible condition of being a Human without a concrete identity. Sewell is the strongest, becoming progressively more alive as he becomes more himself. Friels is compelling as Eddie, who glimpsed the truth of unreality, went mad, but now is resistant to further identify re-writes. John Hurt is Frank Bumstead, another Cop, not insane like Eddie, but instinctually knows there are things that are real that he can’t see, and this instinct leads him to become John’s improbable ally.

 

There was an important exchange between John and Frank:

 

John: "When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?"

Frank: "You know something?"

John: "I don't think the sun even exists in this place. I've been up for hours and hours, and the night never ends here."

 

The weirdest performance comes from Sutherland as Daniel. This film is so solidly rooted in the Noir traditions of the 1930’s – 1940s that it makes no attempt at Multi-Culturalism, but instead establishes its un-Reality by freely mixing elements that are multi-National, but all from a White, Western, and mostly English-speaking, Cultures. The mutating City borrows architectural elements from multiple Western cites, the actors are from Australia, UK, and USA, and don’t disguise their accents. And then there’s Daniel, whose voice is born from somewhere both Germanic and unidentifiable. Daniel projects a certain strength when hinting of his Megalomaniacal fantasies, but proves to be weak-willed in every other possible way. Rob Blackwelder described it as, "Kiefer Sutherland in the Donald Pleasance role."

 

Even with much of the main plot-twist spoiled (at least in the version I saw) there is still power in the film’s scene of Conceptual Breakthrough, involving literally breaking through a brick wall that’s adorned with a picture of a Shell Beach, revealing the emptier but more immutable reality on the other side. The potency of the scene is reminiscent of a key scene in Gene Wolfe’s novel series “The Book of the Long Sun” (first volume published in 1993), which is similarly set on a Generation Starship wherein the inhabitants are unaware of what their environment really is. Perhaps Wolfe’s books were another influence on this film.

 

The film is dedicated to the late Screen-writer Dennis Potter who showed unusual skill in working surrealist imagery into conventional dramas, largely a reflection of his faith in the importance of dreams, and his few SF scripts reflect the same Descartes-inspired paranoias.

 

But the strongest influence may come, not from fictional prose or cinema, but a non-fiction, Daniel P. Schreber's “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness” (1903), a memoir of the author’s Paranoid Psychosis, which proved hugely influential on the Psychological Theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The Character Daniel’s name references Schreber. (And Frank’s last name, Bumstead, is likely a reference to legendary Production Designer Henry Bumstead.) 

 

As John becomes, well, John, he also develops powers that rival the Strangers, mastering a form of Kung-Fu-Telekinesis. The climax is Apocalyptic, as John uses his new powers in a mano-a-mano battle with the leader of the Strangers, Mister Book (Ian Richardson), while the forms of the City explode and reconstitute all around them. 

By defeating the Strangers, John obtains the God-like power to reshape reality, but not the truly Godly Omniscience of knowing what Reality, or anyone’s Identity, actually is. He liberates the populace of City by presenting them with Shell Beach, which Proyas admits was inspired by his own memories of Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s. It is certainly more appealing than what the Strangers inflicted on them, but no less artificial, raising questions about if any form of liberation is truly possible.

 

Out of this initial box-office failure came triumph as it proved to one of the most important productions in Australian history and a huge boom for that nation’s filmmaking.

 

It was remarkably big production for its budget, with 100 speaking parts, 200 extras, 130 member film-crew, 100 member construction-crew, and 40 casual make-up artists. There were 50 sets were built one of which, the Strangers underground liar, took three months to construct. It was among the first films made in the newly opened Fox Studios complex and the size of the production and the previously unheard-of extensiveness of application of digital technology made those facilities a magnet for big-budgeted productions from all over the world, notably "Matrix" and the next several “Star Wars” films.

 

Proyas continued to make films with similar, or greater, budgets, most of which were successful, has since made a short-film set in the “Dark City” Universe titled “Mask of the Evil Apparition” (2021) and has announced he’s working on a related TV series.

 

Trailer:

Dark City (1998) Official Trailer - Jennifer Connelly, Kiefer Sutherland Sci-Fi Movie HD - YouTube