DARK CITY
WenQing
Story by : Alex Proyas
Directed by : Alex Proyas
Main Cast : Rufus Sewell (John Murdoch), Jennifer Connelly (Emma Murdoch), William Hurt (Detective Bumstead), Kiefer Sutherland (Dr. Schreber)
Length : 120 min approx
Official website: darkcity.com
Rating : * * * * our ot * * * * *
This Review Filed: 13 July, 1998.
This review might contain spoilers. Read on at your own risk!
FINDING THE HUMAN SOUL
![[Pic from film ]](/film/images/darkcity4.jpg)
Did you see THE CROW by Alex Proyas? Lots of people celebrate it more because it was tragically Brandon Lee's last starring role, than because of Proyas' film-making. That, I think, doesn't do him adequate justice. Proyas is another MTV director like David Fincher (ALIEN 3, SEVEN), and his direction is stylish, vision is vivid and bold, and he's really creative about the stories he weaves.THE CROW, at its heart, while being a violent thriller, searched for a portrait of the human soul. And Proyas' version of that portrait was that the soul, and its propensity to love beyond all circumstances (even death), was more than the substance of mere memories, and what makes us uniquely human. Alex Proyas also directs DARK CITY, and he revisits these themes about the essence of humanity, love, memory and man's ability to transcend all odds, all set within the gripping story-line of a fantasy/sci-fi world. With DARK CITY, Proyas goes a step further than THE CROW (which was adapted from the James O'Barr comic), and crafts his own distinct vision, and creates an entire world to stage his drama. He's that good, believe me.
DARK CITY is about John Murdoch, trying to find out his own identity. He wakes up in an apartment with a dead woman, and he can't remember who he is, or what he's doing there. He gets a phone call from a Dr. Schreber who says he can help John, but the things Schreber is saying; about memory implants, mysterious beings called "the Strangers," make Murdoch leave the phone dangling by its wire and run from the room. All Murdoch has is a postcard to him from a place called Shell Beach, a place he has no recollections about. He finds out quickly that the police are after him, for the murder not only of the woman in the room, but also five other prostitutes.
The "Strangers" are also after him, and they are spooky human-like beings with bald heads, grey skin and black suits and hats. Murdoch's adventure is a journey of discovering a past that is unreliable, uncertain, and (as it will be revealed as the film progresses) manufactured as well. He needs to find out who his wife is, and deal with her memories of having hurt him, and the love that exists between them. He needs to find out if he is truly a murderer, why the Strangers want him, and the mysterious telekinetic power he seems to wield. And all these revolve around Murdoch's desperate search for Shell Beach, where he thinks he might be able to find some of these answers.
If all this seems confusing and baffling, take heart, they make sense in a comic-book rationale that works on screen and in Proyas' narrative that is compelling and fast-paced. He makes use of brilliantly filmed images that remind me of an MTV video, with its stylistic overtures and savvy. One scene has excellent editing as a lamp hanging from a ceiling swings overhead and puts Murdoch alternately in absolute darkness and then harsh yellow light. Another has Murdoch putting a goldfish into water to save it, shot from inside the water. Proyas uses bold and broad strokes of his imagery to paint a striking and vivid city, where it's always darkest, gloomiest, claustrophobic and always night-time.
With DARK CITY, like THE CROW, Proyas also takes metaphors for day and night, light and dark to cast opposites of ignorance and truth. Murdoch has to discover why there is no daylight in the city, and what is the truth about his past. And when he finds out there is nothing to salvage of the past, it would seem despair eats at the human existence, because the knee-jerk conclusion is that the we're made up merely of a sum of memories.
But what's important about Murdoch's desperate journey is that it offers a message of affirmation. It questions that conclusion about memories and provides its own answer... that looking for the soul in memory is a futile search... that the soul is somewhere else, substance indefinable, impenetrable and yet palpably present.
Against Murdoch's resilience and sometime despair at having no memories, is compared his wife's certainty that nothing can artificially reproduce the love she has for him... and so it goes on to suggest, that it doesn't matter that Emma Murdoch's memories are artificial, that it doesn't matter who they were before the Strangers kidnapped them and implanted them with different identities, it doesn't matter that they've had dozens of identities prior to this one, what matters is that the soul will find a way, no matter the odds, to triumph and bring light and hope into existence.
Proyas does this in such a sensitive and touching way, that at the film's conclusion (which I shouldn't reveal), we are filled with almost exhilaration, as the dark, despairing city is swept away. I felt he managed this well in THE CROW too, with Brandon Lee's Eric Draven feeling that despite the vengeance he meted out on his murderers, he still wasn't beyond the redemptive power of love.
I also really enjoyed the vitality of ideas like how the city goes to sleep at the stroke of midnight, and the Strangers produce different identities and lives for the denizens under their control. One night a family is middle-class, with an ordinary existence, the next, the Strangers have transformed their reality (as they sleep), into a luxurious, affluent and uppity lifestyle, with a home that morphs rapidly into a nothing less than palatial. It felt almost Kafka-esque, like the pauper sleeping one night in a rich man's bed and thinking his life of poverty was merely a dream when he awoke. It was also interesting how Proyas toyed with the idea of sleep and memory, and how it could turn existence in a different direction... but never affect the resilience of the soul.
As I got up to leave the cinema after DARK CITY, my friend commented on how Murdoch's telekinetic ability, called "tuning" by Dr. Schreber, would make him a really cool superhero... and with the way Proyas managed to depict "tuning", a mental power to alter the fabric of reality in visual ripples in the air (like TIMECOP's time ripples), I figured he was definitely right. A really cool superhero in a really cool movie.
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