Dark City (1998)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Dark City (1998) – A. Proyas

Preface:  I found this blu-ray when cleaning out our laboratory which has now been refurnished as staff office space (students don’t attend class in person now, let alone show up for psychology experiments). I don’t think I can describe it without some spoilers (although I’m sure I watched it decades ago and didn’t remember a thing).  So be warned.

Written and directed by Alex Proyas (who had previously made The Crow, 1994, and subsequently made I, Robot, 2004, among other less successful films), this takes its cues from film noir, with Rufus Sewell waking up in a sordid room with a dead prostitute and no memory of who he is or how he got there.  The film seems to take place in the 1940s to boot, with wife Jennifer Connolly singing in a nightclub and detective William Hurt traversing the city at night looking for clues (and for Sewell who has fled the scene).  But all is really not what it seems, as Proyas melds science fiction onto the noir frame to create something much more unique (but which still plays like a crazy homage to cinema classics gone by). I suppose the film could be called “high concept” if you had time to dwell on whether our memories make us who we are or whether there is something more fundamental or innate than that.  But there is no time for that, what with Kiefer Sutherland’s mad psychiatrist running around with huge hypodermics at the beck and call of some bizarre alien creatures animating corpses from the nearest morgue (including children) to pump everyone full of other people’s data.  There, I’ve done it – but isn’t this a spoiler that just makes you want to see what kind of insane work this may be, a work that Roger Ebert called “a great visionary achievement”?  For the record, I watched the Director’s Cut.