Dark City (1998)

Few films that I've seen can be categorized under the specific niche genre of "neo-noir", a modern day revisiting of the classic genre from the 40s and 50s. Neo-noir films sprang up in the 1980s with such films as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and James Cameron's The Terminator, and continued through into the 90s with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell, among several other titles, usually categorized by their noir-esque subject matter and vibe, yet set in either the modern day or even the future, hence the "neo" part.

Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas (the same director of The Crow and I, Robot), came towards the tail end of the era generally excepted as the the main bulk of the time neo-noir films were made, i.e. the late 1990s, early 2000s. It follows the exploits of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who at the start of the film awakens to find himself in a bathtub with a dead body in the next room and no recollection of what's happened. Fleeing the scene, he becomes pursued by strange men, yet is able to give them the slip with psychokinetic powers that he has no control over. Seeking help from a Dr. Daniel Schreber (Keifer Sutherland), he learns that the men pursuing him are a group of aliens known as "the Strangers", and that the city that they live in is of their creation, used to control the lives of its inhabitants in order for them to study the condition of the human soul in a hope of understanding how we as humans work. He works for them by developing serums that they use every night at midnight, in which the entire populace of the city falls asleep, allowing the Strangers to go around and switch around people's lives to their liking, injecting them with the serums to change their memories in order for them to fit the part. Along with Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), Daniel and John attempt to unravel the conspiracy of the Strangers and find out who exactly they, in terms of their identity, are.

The film, hence the title, is very dark, and there is only one instance in the film where there is any natural sunlight, as is it explained that the Strangers hate sunlight and as such keep the city in a perpetual state of night. It helps add to the mystique of the film I feel, as it brings the viewer into the same situation that the main characters are presented in: lost among the endless night of the cityscape, unraveling the context of the situations put forth before them, seeing that there is in fact a grander scheme to the entirety of the city, and trying to grasp onto any semblance of past memories and places that they can think of in order to continue their investigation. It has very noir like environments, with low lit hotel lobbies, seedy back alleyways, neon-lit main streets, smoke filled nightclubs with performing cabarets, the regulars in a genre like this, but also hinting at a bit of a German expressionist design, to the movie specific locations such as the cold, foreign laboratory of the Stangers' mothership. The movie always manages to keep the places interesting and fitting with the overall mood of the film, especially since the Strangers change the look of the city in order to fit with the people's new memories each night. The movie borrows other aesthetic ideas from such earlier films as Nosferatu and Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M, all three of which were cited as inspiration for the film, especially Metropolis which uses the large cityscape to further project the theme of the film, used in Dark City as well with the changing city going hand-in-hand with the inhabitant's changing memories. With its ever constant changing and stylized atmosphere, I was never bored or uninterested with where the movie took me, a definite good mark in my book.

Dark City in a sense is a modern retelling of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", a story he uses in which his mentor Socrates tells Plato's brother Glaucon an allegory of men living in a cave and watching the shadows of the passerby, the men thinking that the shadows are the only things of importance, for humans living and thinking that they and the world around them are the only things worth noting, and that a philosopher such as himself has broken free of those chains of perception to think of things in different, not always so-orthodox ways to come up with new ideas and beliefs. In the city where the residents live their lives without realizing that they're in fact completely set up for them by the Strangers each night, John is able to break free from the Strangers' grasp and see the city for what it really is, that everyone else is just an experiment under observation. At the end of the movie when John takes control of the city himself, he is given control to choose what its inhabitants will do, becoming in a sense the Glaucon in the story by understanding what Socrates has told him. 

The film also borrows other aspects from other such films as Katsushiro Otomo's epic Akira, most notably its ending sequence, and other directors such as Christopher Nolan have cited it as influence for their films, Nolan stating that it, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and other films from the late neo-noir era, which includes his early film Memento, helped inspire him to create his film Inception, as these films also gravitate around the idea of the world of the movie not necessarily being real. Dark City and The Matrix are also often compared to one another, as the genre, plot, ideas, and stylization of both films are quite similar to one another.

Although doing quite well in the box office and being nominated for and winning several awards, Dark City is not well known by many people and is often considered a cult classic among its fans. A DVD of the film was released in mid-1998, and a director's cut version of the film on both DVD and Blu-ray was released in 2008. If you're a fan of either science-fiction, noir, or the movies of such directors as Christopher Nolan or the Wachowski brothers, or are just looking for something that's been under the mainstream radar yet has thought provoking, philosophical undertones, then I would recommend this movie to you. It's well made, has an interesting setting and cast of characters, and will leave you thinking about it for a while to come. I'd give it a 4 out of 5, go check it out. As always, I'm NoirMan and this has been a miscellaneous movie review. Night.