Preface: The Obscure Movie Club is the brainchild of Blog the Obscure. Every other week, someone in the club picks a movie and we all watch it, then that week’s host posts their review on their blog, and the rest of the members add their comments. Everyone is welcome to join. My pick was 1998’s Dark City. My review contains spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
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Dark City is a hard movie to summarize. It’s about murder, conspiracy, psychology, aliens, human nature, time, and memory. But underneath all of those elements it’s a story about finding yourself. John Murdoch wakes up with a head half-full of memories and spends the rest of the movie trying to find out who he really is. The Strangers are trying to find themselves by studying us, so they can break free from their collective memory. Dr. Schreber is trying to find himself by helping John learn how to break free from the Strangers.
On the surface, you have an entertaining thriller of a movie. There’s action, there’s suspense, there’s a whodunnit, there’s a crazy guy throwing himself in front of a train. I really liked the miscellaneous time period that it portrayed too. To me, it seemed like a 50’s vision of the future - dingy and dark, with strange “futuristic” things that didn’t make much sense, like the Automat. As a side note, the concept of the Automat fascinates me, and I want to open one. Anyway, the movie has the look and feel of an old private eye mystery, and layering aliens with telekinetic powers on top of that setting gives it even more of that old-fashioned paranoia feeling.
Watching this movie for a second time, I liked being able to pay attention to everything without trying to figure out what the twist was. Not that you really had to figure anything out; everything is pretty much spoon-fed to us by Keifer “Mr. Explanation” Sutherland’s character when they’re in the boat on the canal. But if all of that would have been done in any other way, the movie would have been at least twice as long. At only 1 hour and about 40 minutes, it could have been a bit longer, but not that by much.
Another thing I really noticed is that The Matrix really rips a lot off from this movie. The main character can break the laws of the physical world, can shape it to his whims, has the powers of the “more advanced” species, he can fly, and he can learn things in an instant by sticking something in his head. Even the sets were re-used in The Matrix! Now, I’m not going to deny that The Matrix created the story in a much more action-packed and visually appealing way, but it seems rather odd that such a similar story would come out only a year later. Of course, Dark City only made $14million so maybe the Wachowskis just assumed that not enough people saw it to make the connection. Or maybe they never saw it either.
The acting was well done for the most part. Rufus Sewell plays the haunted guy very well. This role didn’t seem to vault him to stardom though, and today I think the part would have been played by Joaquin Phoenix. William Hurt was excellent as the quasi-50’s detective. Keifer Sutherland was good in his role, and it’s this movie that makes 24 so hard for me to watch - I remember Jack Bauer when he was this guy. His speech patterns are a bit annoying, but he did a good job playing a stroke victim. Or whatever it was that was wrong with him - I assume it happened when he had to extract his own memories. Jennifer Connelly I could take or leave. She didn’t really do much with the role, but then again it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot for her to do with it. And the creepy aliens housed in dead people served their purpose: they were all creepy. Especially the little kid. I didn’t recognize the names of any of the people who played the other Strangers, except for the super tall guy. That was Bruce Spence, who would go on to voice the shark Chum in Finding Nemo, and play Trainman in Matrix Revolutions and the Mouth of Sauron in Return of the King.
I would not be surprised if this movie stays with you for a while. I first saw it 5 years ago and it was still pretty fresh in my mind when we watched it again last night. Overall I would give it an A, and although I’m not sure I agree with Roger Ebert that it was the best film of 1998 it was certainly better than Shakespeare in Love, which stole the Oscar.
