It's a literally dark movie, full of staggering ideas, visuals.
Weird strangers can change reality, can control time, can modify human memory. And our hero wants to escape from them.
The movie looks like the best bits of Batman, Brazil, Blade Runner, and is hypnotizing.
This is a paper I wrote as an assignment for my Science Fiction Visions of the Post Human Future: Cyborgs, Robots, Viruses, and AI class. That class rules. The assignment here was to analyze a film (or TV show, or even a computer game) and discuss how it related and represented some of the post human themes that have been brought up in class thus far. Don't vote on this unless you really feel strongly about it. I am getting graded on it. And I apologize in advance for all the film faggot talk. This node is about the movie Dark City, so if you haven't seen it, don't read this. Here goes...
Cast: John Murdoch: Rufus Sewell Inspector Bumstead: William Hurt Dr. Daniel Schreber: Kiefer Sutherland Emma Murdoch: Jennifer Connelly Mr. Hand: Richard O'Brien
Directed and co-written by Alex Proyas, a former music video-director, it is not like other movies. It begins with John Murdoch awakening in a bathtub, covered in blood. He has no recollection of what has happened, but is urged by a telephonecall from Dr. Daniel Schreber to flee, as someone is after him. Soon Murdoch is pulled into a web of mystery and must piece his memories together as he finds clues. The 103 minutes are a very exciting time, and one is on the edge of his seat until the very end.
Rated R for violence and sexuality.
Spoiler alert: Yes, the core of the plot is given away, but it bascially is "spoiled" within the first couple minutes anyway. I suspect that some of the most glaring flaws were caused by a studio desire to dumb down the film. In particular, the opening of the film begins with the "mad scientist" Dr. Daniel Schreber, (Kiefer Sutherland) delivering pounds and pounds of sci-fi plot exposition. Apparently the director didn't want to do this, but the studio demanded it. God forbid that audiences would have to try and think without everything dumped into their head. which I didn't like in a film which is supposed to be a sort of horror noir, not a stylish-looking extension of a clichéd space opera. From the first minute forward, you know that telepathic aliens control this world. The suspense comes from whether or not the hero will defeat the aliens, and maybe figuring out whether they are on Earth or some alien planet etc.
There were a lot of moments which I felt were aimed squarely at the adolescent male set, simply because they felt gratuitous, and frankly right out of Dragonball-Z. In a rather malformed climax, the hero, John Murdoch and the lead villain, Mr. Hand, battle with their mind-beams, and their mental will nudges a big energy ball back and forth until of course it finally knocks the villain off his feet, just like Vegeta battling a whatever. And there was also a small creepy child alien who bit people. The alien 'strangers' were sort of nifty, but it seemed like Vincent Price could have hammed it really well here.
The movie has some really tripped-out visuals, and I enjoyed those a lot. The first time you see the buildings grow it is very jarring. The style, in general, is a superb mutant mixture, mostly echoing the '30s, but with a few fluorescent lights and the like, as well. In one part, where the buildings aren't part of the strangers' experiment anymore, the land had the look of a discarded jumble of architectural ideas, which I found quite novel.
The acting and character development was another weak point. The hero had little impact beyond looking confused and maybe tough sometimes. Kiefer Sutherland had an inexplicable accent, though it was a daringly weird role to play, and just didn't quite work. Jennifer Connelly is damn hot, but she seemed not at all compelling. William Hurt, as a detective, was literally jettisoned into space when he couldn't drag the plot anymore.
One thing that surprised me was seeing Jennifer Connelly on the end of a white pier into the ocean, as an emotional, stylized dream moment, which also occurred in Requiem for a Dream.
All in all this movie is all right if you want some really cool visuals, but the story could have been much more compelling, and the characters are mostly weak.
In the movie Dark City there are villans, called the strangers, which the director uses with pop culture's fears. We all have our unique fears. We live our lives with fears of loss of identity, fears of the unknown, and fears of loss of control. These fears include a fundamental anxiety that some unknown force is controlling our lives. Every individual has his or her own unique set of fears, commonly identity loss, the unknown, and who is in control of humanity. These different fears are reflected by various villains, mainly the strangers in Dark City. The goal of many movies is to scare people through using common fears of the culture.
The strangers in the movie Dark City are similar to evil characters in other movies, namely Nosferatu and the Borg. Villains such as Nosfeartu, the Borg, and the strangers are all unnaturally pale, outfitted in black, and typically male. People that are very sick or dead are often unnaturally pale, as well as anyone who is often in the dark. In western cultures, the close family and friends of someone that died were expected to wear black for during periods of mourning. Although the tradition is no longer as strictly followed today, black is still worn to funerals and closely associated with death. Partly due to being thought of with death, the dark color black is often a reminder of dark dreary depression. We relate the villans to sicknesses and death.
The loss of an identity is a major fear for most people in our culture. Especially in times like today, people are required to show proof of identity to go about daily life. In the movie the strangers are constantly creating identities and rearranging identities. There is no way to be sure that your identity is going to stay the same, or that you are going to remember what it is correctly. In our culture today a crook can gain control of a person's credit cards, steal someone's identity, and gain complete control of an identity claiming to be somebody else. Because our identity is such an intimate part of us, an externally controlled change is a violation that fills us with fear.
Most people have a huge fear of losing control, or of someone already being in control of us. When we see bad things happen such a child killed in a fire and we see otherwise normal people like ourselves commit appalling acts of multiple murder, it is very distresssing. One way to understand these horrors is to accept that (at times) something bad is controlling the world. Science has told us a great deal about the world around us, yet most people agree that there is a larger force controlling us. A lot of people believe in a stronger force, whether it is Allah, God, Buddha, or someone else. The majority of people who believe in a stronger force believe that that force is a "good" positive force. Our culture fears that the strong force controlling us is something "bad." As always, some people are different, but the general population is afraid of an evil force controlling us. Our schools teach us things about science that we believe because we are told to. For all we know God, Satan, the CIA, capitalism, or a giant chicken could be controlling us. The list of suspected controllers is limited only by our imagination.
In Dark City the strangers are villains. Each night at midnight, the strangers stop all of the clocks and every human immediately falls asleep. The two most vulnerable times in a person's day are sleeping and showering, the strangers prey on people in their sleep. For example, in one scene in Dark City a poor man in a wife beater and underpants is talking about working the graveyard shift to his wife who is outfitted in curlers and a house dress. The couple is sitting at a modestly set table in a small room with peeling wallpaper and, trash outside of the building.
After the injection the couple is transformed from a slovenly pair to a well dressed husband and wife seated at a grand table. They were sitting with a large table banquet sized with candles, a tablecloth, and more food. The room, fireplace, and stairs all grew. The man in a suit was telling the woman in a classy hairdo that he fired someone who was asking to be taken off the graveyard shift. The strangers were rearranging memories and controlling the humans. The strangers reflect culture's fear of being controlled by something "evil" and uses that to try to scare people.
I think that as time changes, different masks that have been pulled in front of our eyes are going to be pulled over. We will slowly learn that not all things are as they appear, and our culture has been sadly mistaken. Once people find way to understand the world, such as belief in a God, they usually stop searching for other explanations. This can be a deadly mistake. No matter how confident a person is in their beliefs, abandoning the search for new ideas and new explanations is only asking for trouble.
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