# Dark City (1998)

### reviewed by
David Sunga

    DARK CITY (1998)

    Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4.0)
    ********************************
    Key to rating system:
    2.0 stars - Debatable
    2.5 stars - Some people may like it
    3.0 stars - I liked it
    3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie
    4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out
    *********************************
    A Movie Review by David Sunga

    Directed by: Alex Proyas

Written by: Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer

Starring: Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt

    John Murdoch: Rufus Sewell
    Inspector Bumstead: William Hurt
    Dr. Daniel Schreber: Kiefer Sutherland
    Emma Murdoch: Jennifer Connelly
    Mr. Hand: Richard O'Brie

Ingredients: Man with amnesia who wakes up wanted for murder, dark science fiction city controlled by alien beings with mental powers.

Synopsis: What if you woke up one day, and suspected you were not on Earth, and instead were part of an experiment in a giant space terrarium manipulated by intergalactic alien zookeepers? In DARK CITY John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) has this problem.

DARK CITY starts out like a 1940s noir amnesia detective mystery. Poor John wakes up with amnesia in a hotel room with a dead dame in one corner. A mysterious phone call tells him to get the heck out of there, and soon enough John is chased all over town by a murderous army of pale people in black trench-coats, as well as by the police, and the dogged Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt). Is John a murderer, and what can his missing memories tell him? He searches through his own wallet for possible contacts and clues. But when the clues don't fit, it doesn't just confuse him; it causes John to go so far as to question the whole nature of reality in the Dark City.

To John, something is fishy, and very unreal about this city. How come it's always dark, and nobody seems to remember what they did this morning? And how come nobody seems to remember how to leave the city, or how to get to nearby Shell Beach? Every night, around midnight, John notices that the whole city enters a state of suspended animation, and at this time, creepy alien experimenters known as the 'Strangers' come out and do nasty things like inject fake memories into people's heads with big hypodermic needles. The Strangers have the ability to 'tune,' or warp reality using telepathic powers.

Turns out, the city is not on Earth at all. And the reason why John doesn't fall victim to the nightly suspended animation, is because he is a human mutation that possesses the same god-like reality-warping abilities as the Strangers. Even with the help of scientist Dr. Daniel Schreber, can John take back the DARK CITY?

Opinion: Director Alex Proyas (he also directed THE CROW) mentions this in the DARK CITY press kit: In films, science fiction is always "used to have big spaceships blow up cities. I think we're a little tired of that." According to director Proyas, probably the most interesting thing about DARK CITY is its layers. It's designed so that you can watch the film over again, and examine it from the perspective of a main character other than Murdoch. It's a philosophical piece.

Cinematic science fiction is basically a thinly disguised shootout between the good humans and the bad aliens (whether they be Klingons, giant bugs, or proponents of the dark side of the Force). But science fiction in books reaches beyond the 'shoot-em-up' level and targets the big questions, questions like who are we? What is the human condition? What is ethical? What would a true human being do?

Far from comic book style on the order of SPAWN, BATMAN, or THE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, DARK CITY not only features the showdown between good humans and powerful aliens, but it also asks questions worthy of films such as BRAZIL or BLADE RUNNER.

DARK CITY is what philosophers would call an existentialist screenplay. A little more than 200 years ago, the world was filled with unhappy peasants - - unhappy because nearly every aspect of their lives was controlled by totalitarian, military, conformist, medieval regimes. The people took refuge in religion, the idea being that earthly life was a time of suffering, but after death, Heaven would be available. Meanwhile, the State used these same ideas to prop up their regimes; the King was often head of the religion and therefore sanctioned by Heaven. When science finally overturned religion, the medieval dictatorships came tumbling down and were replaced by democratic governments. But the new fear was that the power of science and experimentation would be used to create a world order as darkly totalitarian as the old. This is the time period when writers and philosophers such as Freud, Kant, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky pondered what society should be, and what place the individual had in it. The existentialists' in particular wrote about the power of the lone individual against what may be a hostile, indifferent, or alienated universe.

In DARK CITY, when the last dying, defeated alien asks John Murdoch why the aliens' scientific experiments on the human beings' brains failed, Murdoch replies, pointing to his head, "Because the human condition isn't located in here."

    Reviewed by David Sunga
    February 28, 1998

    Copyright © 1998
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