Like poetry, to fully appreciate Dark City the viewer must understand the intricacies of the film. Many of those who fail to see the genius of this Alex Proyas piece are the same people who do not understand the film. They merely see the picture and hear the sound. My review attempts to take the viewer one step further from what the eyes see to what the mind should see . . .
The Introduction
Alex Proyas’ Dark City takes us on a wild ride of mystery, horror and science. It asks fundamental human questions like what is real, and how can we know what is real, but does so in a manner of absolute confusion.
We first meet John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) naked and confused in a bathtub with a stream of blood running down his forehead. Like a baby emerging from the womb, his head drips with blood, his body wet and naked, and his mind with no grasp of the situation. A few minutes later he leaves the hotel room, room 614, and journeys to find the truth. As he walks down the stairs, neither the audience, nor the confused man, know his name. Later we learn that he is J. Murdoch and later the J turns into John. Thus, we combine John and 614 to the passage in the bible, John 6:14; “So when the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus performed, they began to say to one another, ‘This is certainly the Prophet who is to come into the world.’” (www.netbible.com).
This confusion grows further as Murdoch makes and experiences more things out of the ordinary. He sees doors appear out of walls, city blocks change into city streets, buildings merge, other building splitting into two, and the entire town simultaneously falling asleep. At the automat, the vending door opens automatically after he “thinks real hard,” and strange bald men, dressed all in black, attack him.
Confusion Grows
Proyas does the magnificent task of presenting a very normal 40’s or 50’s setting. This grounds the viewer into a false sense of normality. He then slowly adds paint to the canvas—often times, colors we feel do not belong. Yet, every time he adds something, shortly after, we feel a sense of understanding, which grows into more confusion. As my friend once said halfway through the movie, “I’m on the brink of confusion.”
Seventy-five minutes into the movie the canvas has become an awful mess, but we continue to pay attention because the resolution seems just around the corner. By this time, we know that nothing is real, but we must either trust or listen to the word of everyone.
Who Should We Trust?
John, who has suffered a psychotic break, is the protagonist so we must trust what he thinks. Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) works for the Strangers, so he might be lying, but his unwillingness to speak validates his word when it does come. In retrospect, Detective Walenski (Colin Frieles) tells the whole truth, but after seeing his house, his office, and him, we can safely conclude that he is mad, and thus how valid are his words?
How Do You Get to Shell Beach?
John often asked the question, “Could you tell me how to get to Shell Beach?” He thought that if he could somehow get there, he could find the answers to his questions. Every character had their Shell Beach. John wanted to get there, Emma wanted John to return to her, the inspector wanted to catch John and solver the murders, and the Strangers wanted life. Shell Beach represents the goals, dreams, and desires of all people. Although John literally wanted to get there, he really wanted what it represented—the sun, the tranquility, and most importantly the truth. Put simply, Shell Beach is every thing his world was not.
Shell Beach Is This Way
My favorite scene occurs when he finds the door to Shell Beach. He then opens it, and the viewer believes John sees a blue sky, the sun, and all the goals of Murdoch. The next shot reveals the blue sky as merely an illustration. It is a piece of paper glued to a wall, in a room like every other room in the entire city. We then realize that Shell Beach only exist in only our minds, but since our minds have been implanted, we again ask, “Does Shell Beach exist?” This conflict of knowing something does not exist and never has existed combined with having the memory of an existence rips the mind apart and tortures our very thought process. Dr. Schreber asks “Are we more than our memories?” John would like to think so, but for people in our world today, maybe not.
Are We More Than the Sum Of Our Memories?
Schreber logically pushes the viewer to a question Richard Tarnas asks in his book Passion of the Western Mind; how can we know that our entire civilization was not put here moments ago with our memories implanted. Put simply, what evidence of our existence do we have other than our memories? Tarnas answers that we do not.
Alien Movies of Our Time
I have also heard that the increased production of alien type movie such as Independence Day and Men In Black have been partially fueled by racial conflict in America. Other movies like The Siege have infuriated Arabic racial groups, and other people complained because Catherine Zeta-Jones, a Welsh actress, was casted in her role in the recent movie The Mask of Zorro. In general, most movies with a prominent “bad guy” put some form of racial identity within the character. In professional wrestling, all of the wrestlers who the crowd do not cheer for and the wrestlers who often refer to “dirty tactics” to win, are minorities. And, as one can expect, the Monday after the WWF came to the Assembly Hall, an editorial in the Daily Illini criticized the ethnic selection of the winners and losers. Thus, a screenwriter who makes aliens as the “bad guys” guarantees that the film will not offend any racial group.
The White Man Is The Bad Guy
Proyas on the other hand, does the unique task of making the “bad guys” white males, all of them. He includes old males, middle age ones, and even a little boy. By doing this, he does not offend anyone because the vast number of white males everywhere. Imagine if he had made all the Strangers Italians or Chinese. There would have been a social uproar in the respective community, and Proyas would have a tremendous problem on his hand. In one scene though, a Stranger says, “We use your dead as vessels,” if this is so, where are all the dead females and other ethnicities?
What Proyas Should Have Taken Out
Some aspects Proyas could have left out where obviously computer generated bodies of the aliens escaping the dead human vessels. They reminded me of the starships from Babylon Five mixed with some of Stephen King’s Langoliers. The bald pale appearance of the Strangers strikes a perfect balance of fear and recognition. Adding a computer-generated brain makes them too alien.
The original script named the Strangers the Shadows, and had them more bug-like. Instead Proyas renamed them and put them into human bodies. A subtle conflict of this was that by giving them human bodies as shells for the aliens to live in, it in a sense gave them souls. Thus, when Murdoch kills some of them, their alien escapes, but dies in the air, like a soul leaves the body. At the end John, tells a dying Stranger that “Well you’re not gonna find it, in here.” As he points to his brain. I argue that the Strangers did in fact have souls, but incorrigible souls—perhaps the worst kind of soul to have.
Dark City And America
Dark City reflects current American and perhaps the world society in its depiction of fate, willpower, and conspiracy. People have increased their awareness in faith as shown by the vast number of movies on the subject. Many speakers and writers have made millions arguing and selling their theories on self-control and the strength of the human mind. Additionally, American skepticism has grown exponentially with the release of the Roswell Incident report, and The X-Files. Some movies, like The Truman Show, blatantly admit the conspiracy against the protagonist while others like The Matrix leave the discovering of the “masters” to the characters.
Proyas plays on all of these themes, and shows us that a single man, a messiah, with the right education can achieve greatness. Like The Matrix, he shows that John (or Neo) can free an ignorant population of slaves. However, unlike the movie by the Wachowski brothers, Proyas admits that we humans may suffer the same sickness of the Strangers.
A Rather Crude Experiment
An early scene depicts Dr. Schreber in his lab working on a crude maze shaped in a circle. The camera then focuses on the rat moving in and out of the various paths. Simultaneously, the audience clearly knows that when the rat finds the exit, the doctor will return the rodent back to the cage. He describes the maze as, “A rather crude experiment, designed to further my studies.” Only later does the viewer realize the significance of the rat maze. At the end of the movie, Proyas shows the entire city with building-like walls, and for the second time, we see the rat’s maze, only on a larger scale, and without rats.
How Does One Classify Dark City?
One can easily classify Dark City into the Science-Fiction genre, and perhaps the Sci-fi/Horror section. On other levels of classification, Liberty Miller (http://members.aol.com/lyberty5/matrixpaper.html) also describes the movie as a neo-film-noir. David A. Cook’s definition of film-noir as “More generally characteristic of moral confusion than a specific political condition . . .” fits Dark City very nicely. Unlike other 1950 film noir movies, the Detective, Bumstead (William Hurt) does not solve the movie. He merely acts as the character of reasonable thought that keeps John in touch with reality.
The Original Title
The title, Dark City originates from a 1950’s movie with Charlston Heston with the same name. The original is a detective/noir movie, and included as much violence as the Proyas film. Originally, Proyas named the movie Dark City, but Warner Brothers thought it sounded too much like another one of their movies, Mad City, so they changed the title to Dark World. Universal then thought it sounded to similar to Lost World, so it became Dark Empire, then Lucas got upset with the word Empire in a science-fiction movie. Luckily, for Proyas Mad City did not make it to the screen and he changed the title back to its original two words.
Why The Last 10 Minutes Were Not Awesome
Like almost every other Hollywood movie, Dark City ends with a final struggle. Proyas paints the first 90 minutes with outstanding cinematography enhanced by a soundtrack so perfect it takes the viewer away. The last 10 minutes portray a movie with an ending sold out to Hollywood. After first seeing this movie I described it as the best movie with the worst ending.
The final conflict depicts John fighting all the Strangers with his tuning ability. Wires spark across the screen, the ground erupts, and the fight destroys entire underground Stranger facility. The fight generally occurs between John and Mr. Book, the elder figure of their species. For some reason, despite the fact that all the Strangers have the ability to tune, none of them takes part in the fight. Instead, they all run around like helpless children fleeing from the falling debris. Then, when the facility entirely falls apart, a light comes in and sucks up all the Strangers to the sky, except Mr. Book. Where did this light come from, and why did it suck up the Strangers? Although this scene makes a similar scene from Independence Day look like a home movie, an alert viewer asks, “why.” Perhaps the director did this to remove all the other Strangers and make it a “young John” versus an “elderly Mr. Book.”
Youth Rebellion
This rebellion of the new and the old may have helped to target the young teenage boy market to which this movie advertised. In addition, when Keifer Sutherland first read the script he laughed and said, “I think you sent this to the wrong Sutherland,” but Proyas did not. Had Donald been casted as Schreber, the subtle youth rebellion would not have occurred and as Jason Richardson believes, nor an Oedipus complex.
So, How Many Ways Have You Looked At It?
A viewer can watch Dark City on many levels and see many different ideas. One can look for symbolism and see small yet important ideas. One can watch it for entertainment over and over again. And one can even take it on a philosophical level and compare it to other movies of the past few years. Although I criticize the ending, every time I see the movie the ending somehow gets better. I see more on a religious and mental level, and try to understand Proyas and why Roger Ebert thinks it is the best movie of its year.
This is a paper I wrote during the summer of 1999 for a Cinema Studies 262, Survey of World Cinema, II: The Thirties to the Present class at the University of Illinois taught by David M. Desser Ph.D. University of Southern California 1981. I got an B on this paper—a much higher grade than I expected.
As i recall, the assignment was to discuss the social, political, and economic aspects of the film and the time is was made.
you wouldn't believe how long epinions took to check the spelling on this review
Alex Proyas (The Crow) directed this noir-styled futuristic thriller, scripted by Proyas, Lem Dobbs (Kafka), and David S. Goyer (The Puppet Masters). ...More at Barnes and Noble
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