Dark City: 25th Anniversary
Dark City is not a place that attracts a lot of tourists. New Line Cinema (1998).
By Nick M.W.
Alex Proyas’ follow up to The Crow failed at the box office, but it’s an underrated sci-fi gem.
Dark City celebrates its 25th anniversary today, and I was inspired by the occasion to rewatch this old sci-fi noir thriller. I remember being stoked to see it when the trailer dropped strictly because I loved The Crow. Although Dark City had some of the same 90s goth vibe as its predecessor, this was not the same kind of movie, and it sure as hell wasn’t the movie that I thought it was going to be when I saw it back in 1998.
Look at that trailer. It’s sinister and intriguing. Back then at sixteen, I thought this meant Dark City was going to be something like Total Recall, so I was looking for an action-packed follow up to The Crow. What I got was an Orwellian-themed exploration of what we perceive to be the “real world” and what is in fact reality. Twenty-five years of time and experience have given me a much different perspective on Dark City than I had strolling out of the theater that Friday night long ago. It’s not a perfect movie, like say The Empire Strikes Back or Pulp Fiction, but Dark City is a wildly creative mind-bending film that was more or less the analog version of its cinematic spiritual successor, The Matrix.
Where it’s good:
Let me be clear; I dug this movie 100% more on the rewatch than I did when it first came out, and this was only my second time seeing it. I was so disappointed by what I didn’t get from my first watch on opening weekend in 1998—an action movie like The Crow—that I didn’t bother ever watching it again. In the few times that it was ever suggested I watch this movie again, it was a hard pass, an easy “no thank you.” Give me a couple of decades to get over it, though, and I discovered a movie that challenges us to imagine that the reality we think they know isn’t really what it appears to be. In theme, this is wildly similar to what goes down in The Matrix, and Dark City was released the year before. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the similarities between these two films don’t stop there.
One of the things that Dark City director Alex Proyas and his set designer/s and costume designer/s nailed was the 90s goth aesthetic. It is on point. For example, the villains in this movie are known as Strangers, a parasitic alien race with incredible tele-kinetic powers who inhabit the pale hairless bodies of old white guys (except for that creepy ass little kid) and, for no reason other than “it looks sick”, all wear black hats and matching trench coats, under which they are all rocking heavily laced-up leather duds. It does look a bit like a fetish, but it also makes the Strangers intimidating. They are not here to make friends, but rather they are here to observe the actions of the humans they’ve abducted and kept hostage in their floating space prison. Wild shit.
These Strangers are the Dark City version of Agents in The Matrix. I suppose it would be proper to say that Agents are The Matrix version of Strangers. Besides going all in on the uniformed look, both types of antagonists share a group consciousness that allows them to see what each other is seeing and thus be anywhere in their world at any time. Strangers in Dark City rely on their weird alien hive mind and a giant machine that resembles the inside of a clock to communicate and enhance their powers. Agents in The Matrix are connected via the network and use the code they’re written on to maximize their power in the software program.
Agent Smith (The Matrix) and Mr. Hand (Dark City) are the same character from different realities.
Stacey Shannon wrote a detailed breakdown of Dark City for ThisIsBarry.com in which she highlights the other ways in which these two movies are similar, noting that both movies were shot in Australia and had some overlap with their shooting schedules, but Dark City came out a year earlier. It seems a bit more than a series of coincidences that these two movies have so many similarities, but the truth is that our ideas are not as unique as we think they are. Sometimes, two people have a similar idea, and one of them just executes it better. Obviously, one of these two movies became an international phenomenon that spawned a 3-sequel franchise, and the other got forgotten no sooner than it was released.
In Dark City, it's not clear how many people are part of the Strangers experiment, but it’s implied that the city is a metropolis. It’s kept in perpetual darkness because the Strangers are sensitive to light. The floating space prison is actually a city that is an amalgamation of different cities from different eras in human history. At the stroke of midnight every night, everything in the city is deconstructed, shifted around, and reconstructed, like a Rubix cube of infrastructure.
Again, kudos to set designer and the special effects crew for creating a world that appears as creepy and shadowy as the villains who inhabit it, and for beating the Wachowski sisters (The Matrix) and Christopher Nolan (Inception) to the punch with this idea of being able to tear apart and redesign the world at a whim, whether by altering code or by using your imagination.
The existential concept that Dark City brings up—the idea of living your life for nothing or even living a life that is a lie—hits us grown folks a bit different than it does teenagers. When you pass what is traditionally known as the halfway point in your human life, you might look back on what you’ve been doing and project ahead to what you might still be doing and think “what is this all for?” If you exist in the world of Dark City and you happen to be the protagonist John Murdoch, played by Rufus Sewell, you soon realize that your existence is all for nothing. It is meaningless. Pop a couple of “hard to swallow” pills (could be red, could be blue), sit back, consider your own existence, and recognize the fact that in the grand scheme of things we are all meaningless. The incredibly good deeds of yesteryear and the absolute horrors of our negligible past are all folded over and over by time, getting buried by the decades deeper into nothingness. I love that Alex Proyas explores this the way he does in Dark City. On the rewatch, there were moments throughout the movie that had me stuck considering the experiences of the human characters and relating them to people in our reality who are suffering from dementia, unable to sort their memories or recall people or places from their past.
The performances in Dark City are solid. Sewell was good enough as the protagonist—coincidentally he is the only one in the entire movie who can both see the fake world for what it is and use the Strangers own telekinetic power effectively against them. If Sewell’s character was named “Theo” instead of “John”, perhaps the line connecting him to Neo from The Matrix would have been more obvious. William Hurt and Jennifer Connelly were highlights for me for different reasons. Hurt is great as the signature hard-boiled detective, Inspector Frank Bumstead, bent on trying to catch a serial killer (it’s Murdoch, but not really). Connelly doesn’t have much to do in the movie but serves as the distressed damsel, Emma Murdoch, who is trying to find her missing husband (Sewell) before something tragic happens. She is as gorgeous in this movie as she is in everything she’s ever been in, so she is perfect in her role here.
Keifer Sutherland as Dr. Schreber went all in, but perhaps took it too far.
Where it’s bad:
The biggest issues I have for an otherwise great story and damn near perfect genre thriller proved to be major distractions for me.
Trevor Jones’, whose work on Last of the Mohicans alone should earn him status as a legend, composed an atrocious score for Dark City that is particularly trash during the film’s climax. I’ll take the electronic snaps and night club thumping bass from The Matirx any day over the aggressive and sonically offensive mess Jones created for Dark City.
Keifer Sutherland is a good actor. He’s excellent as a villain—think of that cruel greaser he played, Ace Merrill. from Stand by Me or the glam rock vampire, David, in The Lost Boys—and he can switch it up and play a virtuous hero, too. In Dark City, Sutherland plays Dr. Daniel Schreber, as if he had Aspergers. You can’t put the campy back in the tube once you squeeze it out, so every time Sutherland comes onscreen after the first time we see him, he inadvertently creates a comedic moment in a movie about humans who are held against their will by parasitic aliens in a space prison, a complete vacuum for anything funny.
This brings me to my last gripe about Dark City. The movie’s plot revolves around the concept that a parasitic alien race is dying, and they want to figure out how to survive, so they (presumably) abduct humans and keep them locked in a floating space prison that the aliens have created to resemble human cities in various eras of modern society. They inject their human captives with each other’s memories and observe their behavior for a specific amount of time before they reset the entire experiment and switch up everyone’s memories again.
Why are they going to all this trouble? Well, they want to understand how humans operate so that they can live among them and continue to survive. What I couldn’t figure out, and what the movie didn’t have time to stop and explain, is why they have to blend in with humans to such a degree to survive. Is there something about the human soul that gives these parasites life? I ask this question because the aliens actually control human corpses (the pale old white guys I previously mentioned who are the Strangers). In the space prison, these Strangers live in these dead human shells, and they seem to be okay, so why not just continue to inhabit human corpses and stop wasting time trying to understand people?
The Strangers strange behavior seems to be less about survival and more about torture when observed through that lens.
Conclusion:
Dark City is a dope genre-blending, mind-bending movie that was dead on arrival at theaters back in 1998, but it deserves more love now for being a bit ahead of its time in concept and storytelling. It also had a cool trailer that is straight out of the era.
7 out 10.
Their world on mushrooms.
