Big Screen Future - Dark City
There are a thousand stories in the naked city, and each one of them will be lived by it's inhabitants over and over again. The mean streets shift and warp, names change, streets change but the Shell Beach Express never changes and the Shell Beach Express never stops. Welcome to Dark City, leave everything at the door. Including yourself.
Alex Proyas' film is as mutable as the city it describes, a story that steals the wallets of film noir and Golden Age science fiction whilst they're not looking and creates something entirely new, entirely different. It's Bosch with better urban planning, the story of a lonely man walking down the mean streets who may very well be mean himself.
The story, the world itself in fact, is a puzzle and as a result individual will is second to what roles the characters are obligated to play. John Murdoch is not so much Rufus Sewell's character as the name he wears to enter the world of the city, as vital and as irrelevant as the clothes he's wearing. He's not just a murderer but The Murderer, the boogeyman robbed of everything but his name and no longer sure he's prepared to accept his role in society. Murdoch is a character in search of a different story and the people he encounters are either stereotypes or on the verge of stepping out into the light. The Doomed Hooker, the Lunatic Who Knows The Truth, the Friendly Relative, the Penitent Wife, the Dogged Cop all take their turn in the spotlight and even the lesser characters aren't ignored. Murdoch's belligerent landlord becomes a friendly news vendor, a poor couple become millionaires overnight and the City itself shifts and alters, always growing, always changing, always there. Identity is irrelvant and unncessary, because the City and what lies beneath it is too big, too elemental. This isn't so much a story about the mean streets as it is one exploring why they're mean and the end result is a dizzying sprint through and behind the scenes of a story that is flimsy and deliberately so.
The opening narration manages to almost completely negate this atmosphere, as Kiefer Sutherand, doing his best Peter Lorre impersonation as Doctor Schrieber lays the plot out. The film, certainly on a first viewing, is infinitely more rewarding if this is skipped past and it's no accident that the director's cut removes it.
Regardless, the world that Murdoch and Schrieber inhabit, essentially alone, is one straight out of nightmare, a World's Fair that's curdled and stagnated leaving a trail of empty automats and narrow streets behind it. Proyas lets himself run wild as buildings sprout like plants, staircases expand and at one point Murdoch escapes the Strangers on a rapidly growing chimney. The world is a stage and Murdoch and Schrieber are the only two actors who've seen a script. Even Richard O'Brien's Mr Hand, the Stranger who takes on Murdoch's memories to find him can't fit in here, his fake memories too real, too enticing to be ignored and yet built, like everything else in the city, on sand.
Like all puzzles, the answers that lie at the edge of Dark City are, in a sense, a little disappointing. The journey is more fun than the destination in stories like this and whilst Proyas' hat wearing Strangers are a simply, nightmarish image they become less threatening the more we know about them. The Strangers' best moments occur in passing, Mr Hand's first murder and the pssing reference to how they use the dead as vessels being the best examples. The longer they're on screen the less credible they become and it's no accident that the film's weakest sequence is the telekinetic duel between Murdoch and Mr Book, the leader of the Strangers. It's necessary, both for Murdoch to come into his own and so the final scene can take place but it remains the least interesting sequence in the film.
The film's most interesting sequence follows, as Murdoch, in full control of his abilities thanks to Dr Schrieber, changes the city, adding Shell Beach and, at long last, the sun. The film closes with Murdoch and his wife, along against an impossibly blue sky and tranquil ocean, beginning the relationship they've had at least once before all over again. On one level, it's Murdoch's just reward for the hell he's suffered through but on another it's genuinely sinister. The city has exchanged a group of shadowy architects for one who lives out in the open but whose decisions are still influenced by his own desires. The mean streets may not be mean anymore but that's only because Murdoch wants them to change. Just like the Strangers, he's in charge and just like the Strangers, no one knows the truth.
Dark City is exceptional, it's that simple. Proyas juggles the components of story with elegance and grace to create a film which is as timeless and as versatile as any of the classics of film noir or any other genre. Visually stunning and intellectually deep, it's a film as intricate and as beautifully designed as the clock at the heart of the city, each scene, each line moving the clock hands a few seconds closer to the city's first dawn.