Note: This review pertains to the director’s cut of Dark City and contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the film.
What is it about the 1990s that gave us so many films like this one? Whether it’s Dark City, or City of Lost Children, or even The Matrix (which I bet had the word “city” in the title at first), the decade was awash in reality-questioning, green-tinted stories about chosen one saviors breaking through confusing and oppressive systems. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, each of these movies offers the same sense of grime-ridden trippiness, the same sort of heady themes wrapped in a quasi-blockbuster package, and the same type of dreamlike, steampunk-meets-futurism aesthetic.
Dark City is, at worst, a solid rendition of the form, emphasizing the noir aspects of the subgenre before diving headlong into science fiction. But with so many successors and influences, the bits and pieces of other works that play in the same space loom larger with each viewing.
The film feels like a cross between City of Lost Children and Memento with its “Who are we really?” brand of cinematic identity crisis. Toss in a double life and sub out some of the futurism, and it plays as a spiritual successor to Tim Burton’s Batman films. Or if you’d prefer to focus on the erstwhile normal man stuck in a profoundly abnormal world, you can trace a direct line back to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
But maybe your tastes run more modern. If you’re interested in another piece of entertainment that features maze-like imagery, folks having their identities swapped out and tampered with, growing realizations about an ethically-questionable walled garden, that also happens to be co-written by a screenwriter from The Dark Knight, you can even pop over to HBO and watch Westworld. With all of that shared DNA, it’s harder for Dark City to seem memorable and distinctive in 2020.
"These violent delights have violent ends."
Still, some of the film’s elements stand the test of time and oversaturation — most notably its production design and special effects. Even twenty years later, where photorealistic CGI is omnipresent and capable of depicting just about anything, there’s a fair amount of “How did they do that?” at play in Dark City. The titular metropolis contorts, expands, and transforms as the film’s villains rearrange and reorchestrate it amid a wild, urban ballet. Nothing sells the otherworldliness of this setting better than those dramatic visual flourishes that cement the movie’s grand reveal.
But even when the movie isn’t wowing with its effects, the look and feel of this peculiar city grabs the viewer from the picture’s earliest moments. The production design features the outsized aesthetic and decor that Burton would popularize in the 1990s and which successors like Sin City would pick up later. But the quasi-futuristic noir iconography, the brutalist intricacies of the Strangers’ home base, and the lurid greens and other flashes of color buried in the sturm und drang, give the film a unique character entirely apart from its story.
That story, however shopworn its trappings, encompasses some legitimately weighty ideas. At base, the film asks probing questions about how we define ourselves, the extent to which our identities are mutable, and how to make meaning in a world built without it. The notion of extraterrestrial beings toying with our minds and our environment as one grand study of the human soul, something those beings lack, creates plenty of opportunities to illustrate these concepts in a way only science fiction can realize.
And yet, the film slowly but surely runs out of gas after that big reveal. The early portions of the film where protagonist John Murdock and others grapple with the senselessness of their existence captures a gripping sense of existentialist ennui and dread. Once the film pulls back the curtain, there’s plenty of faux-portentous dialogue trying to unpack those ideas in more explicit terms. But from there on out, Dark City becomes more and more a mere vehicle for those concepts and some ambitious but ultimately stock action sequences, rather than a propulsive and original tale.
"I hereby call this meeting of the Mr. Freeze Lookalike Society to order!"
In the end, Murdock turns out to be the chosen one. He breaks free of his oppressors and uses his powers to defeat them as a new day dawns. That’s a disappointingly familiar narrative to be wrapped in such a unique package. Sure, at a certain level of generality you can break down pretty much any set of films into the same broad tropes. But Dark City remixes a host of fairly standard noir and chosen one story beats and hopes the audience won’t notice because it’s too wrapped up in the movie’s exquisite texture. That texture is indeed fantastic, but at a certain point it’s hard to discern why we should care about any of the people ensconced in that admittedly gorgeous firmament.
Aside from the costuming, the styling, and the backdrop, none of the film’s central personalities are especially memorable on their own terms. Rufus Sewell’s performance as Murdock sees him as the standard-issue nineties film protagonist, with little beyond the superpowers and paint-by-numbers brooding intensity to distinguish him. Jennifer Connelly is the typical femme fatale, given little to do and succeeding at even less of it. And William Hurt plays the standard issue gumshoe, an alternative protagonist soon reduced to cannon fodder.
Things don’t improve in that department among the foils and antagonists. The cadre of bald, creepy-looking alien overlords are memorable for their look and demeanor, but don’t posses much of an internal life — not even the one meant to seem more human after he steals Murdock’s memories. Only Keifer Sutherland really stands out in terms of performance or character, going full ham as the quisling human providing aid and comfort to our alien oppressors. At least Sutherland makes choices as a performer here, even if they’re not necessarily good ones.
That’s the major problem with Dark City. For all of that outstanding design-work and intriguing ideas the film’s infused with, it struggles to tie any of that to characters worth investing in. Their dialogue is leaden; the performances are over-the-top and unconvincing, and the story they propel is a big ball of mush slowly rolling down a hill rather than a clear, escalating narrative.
"Look, I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but I think this county fair has gotten out of hand."
Part of that sludge-y story sense helps contribute to the intentionally disorienting qualities of the film, putting the audience in the same shoes as the movie’s protagonist. But that sense of uncertainty and disarray doesn’t stop when the screenwriters’ cards are finally on the table, suggesting that the shared bewildered reaction from characters and viewers alike is an accidental result rather than a deliberate choice, or at least an element that goes too far.
Still, the aesthetics alone are reason enough to stop by Dark City. The philosophical underpinnings of its cinematic allegory of the cave provide plenty of reasons to chew on the film’s themes and thought experiments. But those thoughts often feel unfinished and less than fully realized, wrapped up in people and plot points that can’t quite support the movie’s lofty notions or justify its narrative. The great elements of the film — its look, its feel, and its ideas — just barely outweigh the nuts and bolts character and story choices that leave it as something a little lesser than its influences, contemporaries, or successors.
