# Dark City (1998)

### reviewed by
Curtis Edmonds

by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org

The best thing -- in fact, the only good thing -- I can say about Dark City is that it made me want to go see L.A. Confidential again. Or go rent Body Heat, to see William Hurt do some real noir. Or even -- God help me -- Palmetto.

Alex Proyas's new movie screams atmosphere. I screamed, too, "Get me out of this theater!" New Line Cinema spent millions of dollars creating the expressionistic film noir visuals and paying the actors, and doesn't have any way to get it back. I paid $4.25 for a matinee screening and don't have any way to get my money back, either.

You'll hear a lot from other critics about the look and feel of this movie. I will admit that the cinematographers and costume designers and set artists and CGI graphics geeks all worked hard to create a stunning, nightmarish future world where it's always a late night in 1948, complete with rotary phones and automats and fedoras. I've got news for you fellows -- I don't care how hard you worked, or how visually stunning this movie looks -- you wasted your time and mine, working on a movie without a plot, without a clear sense of direction of where it wanted to go, without a soul or a reason to care.

The movie starts out oh-so-promising. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) is lying in a bathtub in the sort of seedy hotel that in real life, would have been boarded up long ago. There is a dead, mutilated prostitute in the other room -- a surprise, as he has lost his memory. The phone rings: it's a sinister-sounding man, claiming to be his doctor, telling him to flee for his life.

All well and good, right? Wrong. Apparently, someone decided that the audience was just a bit too dim to figure out the intricacies of the plot. (This is getting to be a popular assumption in Hollywood.) So, the actual beginning of the movie is not Sewell running for his life, rather, it's a voice-over narration by the aforementioned doctor (Keifer Sutherland) explaining exactly what is going on and who is responsible. It's as though Sam the piano player had told us that Rick and Ilsa had been getting it on in Paris in the first three minutes of Casablanca. No, wait, that's not fair to Casablanca. It's more like watching a new plotline at the first of the show -- or if you want to know how I really feel, having an off-screen narrator explain that Gilligan won't be getting off the island in this episode.

>From here, the coherence of the plot goes down faster than (insert Monica Lewinsky joke here). The characters just wander around the city aimlessly and bump into each other for no apparent reason, and that's what moves the plot. What we're left with is a string of unanswered questions that don't make any sense. We're given aliens with unlimited omnipotent powers, yet they forget to use them at critical moments and get themselves killed. We're given a hero who can "tune" into these same powers, yet he only uses them when it's convenient to the plot. We're given a whole long list of loose ends that go nowhere

Usually, critics will say that an actor playing an underwritten part "isn't given much to do." In this movie, no one is given anything to do. Sewell is given the impossible role of a man who doesn't remember anything, and plays it like... um... a man who doesn't remember anything. The aliens are tall, pasty-faced, and bald, and wear long black cloaks and fedoras to remind us that they're evil -- and there's a child alien as well, straight out of an Anne Rice novel. Sutherland is saddled with a limp, a twitchy eye, and a breathy accent to remind us that he's in league with the aliens.

To its credit, Dark City boasts two impressive bits of casting. William Hurt is perfectly cast as the world-weary inspector charged with catching the man who is murdering prostitutes all over the city. Jennifer Connelly, playing Sewell's love interest, is given two all-too-brief moments on screen as a lounge singer -- and turns in the sexiest performace this side of Jessica Rabbit. But instead of the dogged policeman and the femme fatale given central treatment in the script (the way they would be in any self-respecting noir movie) they're almost tangiential to the plot, such as it is.

The problem with Dark City is this: it's a bad science fiction movie pretending to be film noir. The essence of film noir isn't, as Proyas seems to beleive, breathy dialogue or snap-brim fedoras or tall, bald evil villains who would make Peter Lorre curl up in a corner. Dark City has not one bit of intrigue, moral ambiguity, suspense, or anything else that keeps us coming back to the noir classics.

Dark City is like the intricately carved door that Kate Winslet floats on in Titanic. It's an exceptionlly well-made and intricately designed piece of flotsam, sailing around and around the middle of the ocean, going nowhere.

    Rating:  C-

    --
    Curtis "BlueDuck" Edmonds
    blueduck@hsbr.org

The Hollywood Stock Brokerage and Resource http://www.hsbr.org/brokers/blueduck/

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