Dark City
Year:
1998
Directed by:
Alex Proyas
Rated:
R
Country:
Australia
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 51 min.
Production Company:
Mystery Clock Cinema
Written by:
Alex Proyas
Lem Dobbs
David S. Goyer
Starring:
Rufus Sewell
Kiefer Sutherland
Jennifer Connelly
William Hurt
Similar Films:
Dark, intriguing, multi-layered.
Why do you watch movies? Is it to lose yourself? Is it to understand life a little more? Is it to have a good time? Is it the sight, the suspense, the implications of what happens on the screen that draw you in? Or is it all of these? Dark City seems to align its facets toward every reason there is to watch a film. It covers philosophical ground that the viewer can relate to, and though this particular territory is familiar, it is explored with such visual power that it feels totally new.
In a short prologue, a Dr. Schreber tells us that there is a race of beings called "Strangers," who have existed since time itself. They have achieved the ultimate technology: the ability to alter physical reality by pure will. However, their race is beginning to die off, and, in search of the secret to immortality, they have discovered us. They have secretly taken over one particular city and are toying with it, altering every aspect of its reality -- everything from people's memories to physical structures to the layout of the city itself -- in hopes of fully understanding us and, thus, gleaning the secrets to immortality. Throughout the film, we mostly follow a man named John Murdoch, who wakes up in the city one day amnestic and framed for murder. He occasionally sees items that provide him with small clues and quick flashbacks as to who he was. With some help from Dr. Schreber, Murdoch also learns that he was a failed test subject of the Strangers, which is why instead of having a false set of memories, he has very few memories at all, except for some involving a beach. The aliens have also set him up as the murderer of a prostitute, so he has to evade both the Strangers, who are out to recapture him, and the law, while simultaneously trying to figure out who he is and just what in the world is going on.
The intertwining themes this film is getting at are those of identity and reality. Is a person the sum of his past, who he accumulates himself to be? Or is there something at his core that makes him a certain way? If you wake up with the physical surroundings, memories and the mindset of a murderer, does that make you, to yourself or to the world, a murderer? If you wake up in total chaos with no memories, or with a few memories that you can barely piece together, do you have a real self? What makes us, deeply, truly, infinitely, our unique selves? If there is something significant about or memories and our perceptions, neither of which are fully constant, what does that say about reality?
These are fascinating questions indeed, but they have been asked many times before. In cinema alone, down as far as the king of it all, that enigmatic search for identity in Citizen Kane, this question has been asked and studied. Our postmodern era, with films as gleefully skeptical as Memento and The Usual Suspects, is on a whole concerned with this very concept. And if there was anyone left by 1999 who had not experienced the questioning of reality, the popularity of The Matrix finished knocking that door right off its already worn hinges. Even hundreds of years ago in Paradise Lost, Satan claims, "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (Book 1). There are hundreds of places you can find this concept being explored in different ways, and I'm sure it goes back much earlier than I have taken it here. The question is not exactly original, but it seems that it is a question we cannot, and perhaps should not, stop asking.
This movie does have a claim to originality and insight, and that lies in the way in which it presents these questions. It does this through amazing special effects and smart thematic imagery. Even the playfulness of The Matrix never gave us an on-screen physical manipulation of an entire city. You literally get to watch buildings as they move apart or closer together, stairwells as they extend themselves, street systems as they alter course. And as the film goes on, the visuals become only more and more astounding. If, somehow, you were to ignore the film's philosophical concerns, you would still be amazed by the look of it.
Aside from the special effects, there are static images, such as the recurring spiral, which enhance and deepen our understanding of the film. The spiral, which is the film's chief image, pops up all over the place -- carved into the dead prostitute, drawn on the walls of a man going mad, constructed as a rat maze, and more. The spiral is the perfect visual motif for Dark City because it goes inward and inward, deeper and deeper, as Murdoch tries to discover who he is, until it approaches its own middle, at which point we can follow it no longer. This is what also happens in another sense when Murdoch attempts to get to the bottom of his reality, the outermost level of his world. When he goes as far as he can in his search, a sublime and almost nihilistic scene occurs. Murdoch begins literally chipping away at a false memory to see what has lied behind it all this time. Despite Schreder begging him not to do so, he finally succeeds and finds on the other side of this construct . . . well, that would be a spoiler.
