Dark City

Directed by: Alex Proyas
Starring: Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connelly

Dark City is a wonderfully dark and dank chunk of modern day film noir about a man’s frantic attempt to discover his own identity in a world of facades.

Usually when you wake up in a hotel bathroom and can’t remember anything it means you had a good time the night before, but when John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a hotel bathroom and can’t remember anything - not even who he is - and then finds a mutilated hooker in the bedroom it means trouble. He anxiously begins rummaging through the hotel for clothes and clues when the phone rings. On the other end is Dr. Daniel Schreber (Keifer Sutherland) warning him that he is being hunted and that the hunters are in the hotel. The hunters are strangers from another world with the ability to “tune”, a psychic skill allowing them to alter the physical world around them. John narrowly escapes…and then the excitement begins, as we follow John’s frenzied, surreal quest to not only uncover his own identity, but to avoid capture from the strangers and the city police who want him for a string of unsolved prostitute murders.

The Matrix Can Kiss My Ass is what this movie should have been called. Although it came out a year before, its premise is remarkable similar: Everything you believe the real world to be is actually a false impression forced upon you by an unknown puppet master for sinister means. In this case, the puppet master is a collective of mentally linked strangers of another species who have encapsulated and removed from earth an entire city for the purposes of study. Every night at midnight the city is shut down, the people are rendered unconscious, and the strangers come out to conduct their experiments; swapping lifetimes of memories between people in order to observe their reactions and ultimately discover the secret of what it means to be human.

The dark city in Dark City is a wonderfully grimy and gothic, 1940’s era masterpiece comprised of towering shadowy buildings and damp, gritty thoroughfares. Imagine Batman’s Gotham City with less streetlamps. The city itself seems to become a character in its own right as it undergoes its continual shape shifting by the “tuning” of the strangers’ minds.

Dark City is a fantastic movie, though one you may never have heard of, and surely worthy of more than a few spins around the DVD player.


Clif

Want to share an opinion about this movie or review? To the forums!