Stuart Lichtenberg: Response to Dark City

"First there was darkness…"



So begins Alex Proyas' 1998 sci-fi film "Dark City". And although the darkness is the beginning, so also is it persistent. "Dark City" is a landscape awash in shadows. Towering, monolithic skyscrapers, seemingly amalgamated from every period of the 20th century, rise from dingy, lonely streets. People shuffle about like automatons, captured in the creeping alienation that the urban landscape is wont to produce. Into this world wakes John Murdoch, a man who has no memory of his past, save flashes of the idyllic Shell Beach. Confused and frightened, he wanders the streets of Dark City searching for answers. They are quickly found: John is wanted for the murder of seven hookers. Likewise, he has no memory of, nor seems to be of the disposition to commit such crimes. This, however, proves to be the MacGuffin of the film. In pursuit of John are the Strangers, extragalactic creatures in search of the soul. For you see, the City is their Petri dish, and its inhabitants the mold being studied.

Science fiction in the movies has, in the past two decades, experienced a renaissance of sorts. What was once regarded as the realm of teenage boys has matured to the point of being able to present meaningful, thought provoking subject matter on the same level as realistic cinema. What began with Fritz Lang's epic "Metropolis", and continued to grow with Stanley Kubrick's "2001", has flowered beautifully with films such as Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", Masamune Shirow's "Ghost In The Shell", and the Wachowski Brother's "The Matrix". Each of these films explore a common question: What is it that makes us human? Is it a physical body? Thought? Memory? Or is it something else, somehow immaterial and indefinable? Mr. Proyas' "Dark City" fits well into this listing, and in a number of ways exceeds its brethren.

Visually, "Dark City" pays homage to "Metropolis" almost to the point of being a derivative work. Skyscrapers dominate the landscape of both films. All of the architecture is made of cold stone and metal, reaching skyward, a tribute to man's ability to engineer and conquer. The cities diminish their inhabitants, reducing them to mere cogs in a great machine. Endless avenues snake throughout the respective settings, seemingly going nowhere (and in the case of "Dark City", literally). With no natural sunlight, everything in "Dark City" is covered in an incandescent haze. The photography really emphasizes the differences between light and dark, clear and obfuscated, illusion and reality. If one pays close attention to the camera work in the film, certain things tend to stand out, most notably the extremely short duration of each shot. Consequently, there are relatively few pan shots to be found in the film as well. Color also plays an important part. All of the scenes shot in the chambers of the Strangers have a bluish tint to them, in contrast to the artificial, but yellow light of the rest of the city. This makes them seem all the more foreign and threatening.

Though the visuals of "Dark City" are extremely well done, the area where the movie really shines is in the plot. This is also where the parallels between "Dark City" and its contemporaries are most apparent. John Murdoch is forced to confront many difficult questions. Finding that his memory and the memories of all the inhabitants of the City are manufactured, John ironically finds exactly what the Strangers are looking for. What is a human? If memory is tenuous and imperfect, then what defines us? In all of the Strangers attempts to recreate human experience, they are unable to recreate real human emotion. And in this we are given an answer to the questions posed in the film. This is also the area in which "Dark City" outshines its peers. There is nothing ambiguous about what the film is confronting, nor in what is found.

It is thus apparent that "Dark City" fits into the library of great 20th century science fiction. It is unfortunate that it is somewhat ignored compared to other blockbusters such as "The Matrix". This however does not diminish the value of this great movie. I would highly recommend it, not just to science fiction lovers, but to all movie lovers.