I vaguely remembered Dark City being advertised, upon its release in February 1998, but only knew one person who saw it in theaters and they told me it was just okay. So, I was surprised when I saw at the end of the year that it landed at #1 on Roger Ebert's year-end top ten list. That made me want to check it out and see why America’s most famous film critic would lavish such high praise on it. I did and just thought, "It was okay.” But then I started thinking more about the philosophy behind it, and most especially the images contained within it. In its own special way, Dark City is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Not in the beautifully filmed rolling hills landscape kind of way, but more in the Blade Runner gorgeously realized and expertly shot kind of way. I knew I had to revisit it.
The first section of the movie is brilliantly constructed in a way to throw us a little off balance in our first viewing. Our protagonist, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), doesn't know who is he, where he is, or why he's there. Director Alex Proyas shoots with no camera movement, and the rapid cutting and seemingly disconnected storytelling puts us subconsciously in the shoes of our hero. Slowly, Murdoch starts to put together the strands of his life with the help of his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly), the mysterious Doctor Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), and the hard-boiled Detective Bumstead (William Hurt), who is assigned to a murder case that John is the lead suspect in. But John is also being trailed by The Strangers, a pale group of men in trench coats and hats who have mysterious powers and seem to be around every corner, led by Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien). Who are The Strangers and why do they want John Murdoch?
As John begins to get his wits about him, Proyas slowly starts letting shots linger a bit longer, the camera moves a bit more, and yet never lost is the remarkable attention to visual detail that Proyas displayed in the earlier sections. Also never lost is the paranoia draped over this movie. At one point, Bumstead meets with a former colleague who has apparently gone mad, obsessively drawing spirals and ranting that his wife isn’t his wife. Bumstead sees a connection with Murdoch’s own ranting of not knowing who he is.
The movie is chock full of references to other works, whether it's the landmark silent era epic Metropolis, the anime classic Akira, or the short stories The Tunnel Under the World and The Lottery in Babylon. Another influence, the 1995 French movie The City of Lost Children, is even quoted when one of The Strangers mentions that the city’s occupants "Walk through the city like lost children." I was always caught by the incredible German expressionistic architecture, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the subconscious evocation of old school noir movies. Subconscious to me, because I didn't know much about noir at the time, though it has since become possibly my favorite genre of movie.
So I had just thought it was okay on initial viewing, but I bought it on DVD in probably 2000 or so, watched it again, and liked it a lot. Then a few weeks later watched it again, and loved it. A few months or a year or whatever later, I watched it again and decided it was one of my favorite movies.
In 2008, director Alex Proyas released his Director's Cut of the movie. I'm not normally a fan of Director’s Cuts, but this one took one of my favorite movies and turned it into an all-time top five for me. The theatrical cut is like a sprint, the quick cutting and relentless pacing rushing towards the final confrontation. The Director’s Cut adds in just a few scenes, but Proyas cuts them in in a way that lets the movie breathe and not exactly take its time, since it is still paced quite rapidly, but it now feels like it's not the sprint to the finish line that the original cut is.
Also, perhaps most importantly, the Director’s Cut omits the opening narration from the original theatrical version. The studio thought audiences were too dumb, or too impatient to watch a movie they didn’t understand. So rather than let Proyas tell the story and have the audience know that the director won’t leave them hanging, the studio mandated Sutherland’s Dr. Schreber explain the entire backstory of The Strangers before we ever meet them. The revelation of who they are, then, comes not as a wonderful twisting of the noirish plot, but the revealing of information we already got in the first 90 seconds of the movie. So, if you’re watching the theatrical cut, please mute the TV until you see Kiefer Sutherland’s character. But get the Director’s Cut if you can. It’s the superior version.
Even with the innumerable references contained in the movie to various works of art, the thing that Dark City most often gets compared with is The Matrix. They came out a year apart, in February of '98 (Dark City) and March of '99 (The Matrix). They are both dark on a visual level, there are trench coats and science fiction and all that, and deal with the central idea of "what if the world you live in isn't real?" a classic sci-fi concept that both movies use as a launching pad (though isn’t original to either movie as an idea and can be traced back to ancient Greece). The Matrix uses that set up for half-hearted philosophy, but mainly for a very well done action movie, and even reused a few of Dark City's sets on its Sydney sound stage. Dark City uses it for philosophical contemplation and half-heartedly for an action movie. I would never dream to tell you that Dark City has visual effects equal to The Matrix’s, but I will always stand by the notion that Dark City has much more on its mind, is infinitely more artistically interesting, and with much better plotting and motivations than The Matrix. But as things go, Dark City was a financial flop and a year later The Matrix was one of the biggest successes ever made. So, it has become the standard bearer, while Dark City has stayed around mostly with cult movie status.
Alex Proyas also uses the story conceit as an excuse to have incredible image after incredible image on screen. He had his background in music videos and if not for the visual mastery he’d already displayed in his previous movie, The Crow, I would’ve been very surprised by what he created here. I’ve actually watched Dark City in slow motion before, and just marveled at images so perfectly framed and constructed that I didn’t want the next shot to come yet.
Roger Ebert said it so eloquently in his original review (he later wrote another one, when he added it to his list of "The Great Movies," as well as doing a commentary track for the DVD, which is a wonderful dive into appreciating the movie and how densely constructed it is) and I can't top it, so I'll just close with his quote "If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then Dark City is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects - and imagination."
