Review of Dark City (1950) by Diego T — 24 Apr 2014

SPOILERS ABOUND IN THIS REVIEW. If you have not yet seen Dark City, stay away. You have been warned.

Sometimes, a movie can have a killer premise, one so clever, you wonder why nobody has done it before. Then you see the film, and you realize why no one has. Dark City is one of these films. Alex Proyas's sci-fi noir's originality is both its greatest asset and its eventual downfall, because on one hand, this film is about a city in space controlled by aliens... awesome, right?! But on the other hand... this film is about a city in space controlled by aliens. Sorry, but as cool as that is, it's dumb. For the most part, Dark City straddles that line between creativity and outright lunacy admirably well, but it eventually devolves into a drawn-out Dragonball Z battle in the spirit of The Matrix Revolutions. In short, weird is good, but if you don't have some substance to back up the crazy shit you're putting onscreen, don't even bother. I'd rather have an uncreative film that does great things with its simple premise than an endlessly inventive one that also happens to make no sense whatsoever.

Dark City stars Rufus Sewell as John Murdoch, a man who wakes up in a tub with no memory of his life and, more importantly, no clothes. I was expecting his kidney to have been stolen as well, but that's a different film altogether. Anyway, long story short, John has been framed for killing numerous prostitutes around Dark City, a crime he didn't commit (or so he thinks, as he has amnesia). However, what starts out as a straight-up noir film suddenly takes a radical shift for sci-fi with this plot twist: Aliens have set up the Dark City in the middle of space as a way to study humans. They use their telekinetic energy to guide machines that rearrange the city every night... or something... and change everyone's lives around. Wow... so this is where all my missing socks go. They also have enlisted the help of a doctor (Kiefer Sutherland of 24 fame) to inject the humans with serums that fuck with their heads and change their memories. Think this is weird? Keep reading.

Not only does this film expect the audience to take on faith the concepts of telekinetic city-rearranging machines, tangible memories that can be physically extracted from humans, and a fucking metropolis somehow surviving in the vacuum of space, but it also provides no explanation for a lot of key plot points. The film's biggest element is the fact that John has gained the alien's telekinetic abilities and therefore was able to wake up before new memories were injected into him. How did he gain these powers? We'll never know. By the end of the film, he's flinging clocks around and doing battle in the air with sinister-looking bald Aryan men. This is not the thinking man's science fiction film I was hoping for. Although the movie raises a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be human (specifically whether or not our memories fully shape who we are and if we have souls), but it's a lot more concerned with asking questions than having the balls to answer them.

The acting is meh, especially from the aliens. They ham it up like the cornball action heroes of old. Honestly, this film wants to be taken seriously, but I was waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to show up and start kicking ass. That's how silly it was. Meanwhile, Sewell is generic and dull as the lead, not giving the audience anything to connect with other than the typical "Everyman-in-a-crazy-situation-with-extraordinary-powers." Kiefer Sutherland though... he's a whole new level of bad. Not only is he not killing terrorists in this movie, but he's playing a wimpy, sniveling mad scientist. How fucking creative. He's incredibly cheesy in the role, but even if he had delivered an acting powerhouse here, I doubt he would have saved the character from being confined to typical sci-fi b-movie tropes. I played a character just like this in a school play in freshman year, people... trust me, there's not much to it. Sounding smart and German is not acting, and it's also not a character trait.

I could easily go on about this film's plot holes (how did Sutherland remember wiping his own memory if he, you know, wiped his own memory?) and absolutely ludicrous sequences (that final battle... I cannot bring it up enough), but I'll cut myself off here. Final Score for Dark Shitty: 4/10 stars. This movie could have been awesome if it had kept a brain to it, but ultimately it got far too caught up in the set design, special effects, and admittedly cool story to ever end up being as smart as it thinks it is. The second installment in the powerful sci-fi/noir films directed by Alex Proyas that question what it means to be human series (I, Robot) is far better, and actually has some committed performances and a plot that doesn't go completely off the rails in the final act. As popcorn entertainment, you could do worse. But for those of you who want to engage your brains, Dark City is not the film for you.