by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

An entire city falls asleep at once. They collapse where they are: Some are in the street. Some are eating. Some are walking. Everyone falls asleep at once, except for one man. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), comes to in a bathtub with a wound on his forehead and a trickle of blood running down. When he walks into his living room, there is a dead woman—presumably killed by him.

John has no memories. He doesn’t know who the dead woman is, how she got there—or even who he is, or how he got there, for that matter. He escapes his apartment, being pursued both by the police and a group of strange men dressed all in black (called the Strangers) and begins to piece together the clues that present a view of his life, to find out who he is. Wherever he goes, John is in the shadows. The city of Dark City is just as it sounds, a city that’s always cloaked by the darkness of night. No one has seen the sun for as long as anyone can remember.

The Strangers catch up to John and try to inject him with something. He fights back and accidentally discovers he has telekinesis and uses this ability to keep them back, killing one of them. A creature crawls out of the head of one of the Strangers and dies.  

Meanwhile, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) and John’s wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) work together to find him. The detective wants to catch a killer, and Emma just wants to make sure her husband is found safe.

So much of Dark City is built on the foundation of its surprises it has in store. I’m afraid of going on too much and giving away too many of its secrets. To this day, even though it has a pretty decent cult following, Dark City is a criminally-underseen movie. It’s not exactly a surprise why it didn’t do well at the box office in its initial release…many great films don’t.  But I’m surprised it’s not more well-known now. The people who love it sing its praises.  

Roger Ebert, one of the movie’s original champions, named it his favorite movie of 1998 and even provided an amazing audio commentary track for its DVD release that is like a mini film school class. If you ever want to learn a thing or two, or have just a passing interest in film theory, just put that bad boy on. Sit back and listen. Ebert packs a lot of information into that commentary and it’s all really great, valuable and practical information for anyone who’s serious about film theory or filmmaking.

There’s something magical about the way that Dark City sets something up and then subverts your expectations. For example, it sets up a manhunt for its main character, pitting the detective Bumstead up against John.  You expect Inspector Bumstead and Murdoch to be constantly outwitting each other, not unlike something from The Fugitive, but it never has any interest in that, and wisely not. The strange goings-on of the city are so apparent, it would be strange if no one noticed them. And so, Inspector Bumstead does take notice. He comes to understand John and why he’s running. It reminds me of the scene in The Sixth Sense when Haley Joel Osment’s character tells his mom the truth about his abilities and she believes him. In a less-assured movie, it would feel obligatory to have the reveal of the truth be met with disbelief, even though that’s not what would happen at all in real life. 

Like Alex Proyas’s other great film, The Crow, Dark City is the kind of movie they just don’t make anymore. Look at something like Dark City or even the Tim Burton-directed Batman movies, and in all of those movies, the city feels alive. The cityscapes look like Fritz Lang’s nightmares. The cities look like something not of the past, not of the present and never of the future. It’s like they contain elements of every time that existed, but don’t belong in any era.  Smoke stacks loom on the horizon. Ugly skyscrapers grows like twisted fingers. Movies with big, elaborate city sets like this just don’t happen anymore, not with green screen being so prevalent and easy to film now. I don’t have a problem with CGI—and Dark City uses a fair amount of it—but it’s sad to see movies like this go the way of the dodo. It’s nice to see something that was built and exists in a physical reality.

Little things in movies like this make all the difference. The little hints about the true nature of the city and its inhabitants are hinted at, but in such subtle and subconscious ways that it takes repeat viewings to pick up on all the acting and directorial nuances. If you watch anyone’s performance at the beginning of the movie compared to a later performance near the end, you’ll see a major dramatic shift, like they’re becoming more comfortable saying their lines. These are all professional, seasoned actors (William Hurt and Keifer Sutherland had been acting for decades at this point), so that’s a conscious decision to allow those performances to grow like that, to reflect the story and its emerging reveals of the central mystery at the center of the story.