by Alex Proyas, 1998.
Starring: Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Richard O’Brien, Rufus Sewell, and Kiefer Sutherland.
Rating: 8/10, 9.5/10.
Dark City is Metropolis made with today’s technologies and attitudes, married to the mood of the first Batman movie (Tim Burton’s, that is, not the one from the sixties), with a lot of the children of film noir thrown in. Its mood and storyline are nearly perfect (with the exception of the very end, which seems tacked on to me).
I don’t want to tell you too much of the plot, but I’ll tell you that it involves a man (Sewell) waking up in a bathtub in an apartment that also includes a ritualistically murdered prostitute. His memories are fractured, his forehead is bleeding, and he receives a phone call from a mysterious man named Dr. Schreber (Sutherland) telling him to get out of the apartment as soon as possible.
That’s how it starts. Along the way, we get "the Strangers," among the most genuinely creepy movie villains of all time (somehow their system of naming themselves—Mr. Hand, Mr. Book—adds to their creepiness), we get the man’s wife, Emma (the illustrious Jennifer Connelly) singing in nightclubs, we get some of the most shocking plot developments I’ve ever encountered. And most importantly, we get beautiful image after beautiful image. I wish I could include hundreds of stills at the top of this page just to prove to you how stunning this film is visually.
This film is practically flawless, with the exception, as I mentioned, of that last scene. Everything right up until then is dead-on perfection, and even that problematic last scene isn’t nearly as problematic as I’ve probably led you to believe. It fits, I just think it could have been better.
So see Dark City, for god’s sake. Don’t let the advertising fool you, this isn’t some kind of juvenile thriller. It’s a fantastic, imaginative, stirring film that will not leave you for quite some time.