Dark City Blu-ray
The critically-acclaimed triumph from visionary director Alex Proyas (I, Robot, The Crow) is back with a brand new directors cut featuring enhanced picture and sound, never-before-seen footage and three commentary tracks that take you deeper than ever before into the world of one of sci-fis most exciting and revered tales. When John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes with no memory at the scene of a grisly murder, he soon finds himself hunted by the police, a woman claiming to be his wife and a mysterious group of pale men who seem to control everything and everyone in the city. Starring Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), William Hurt (A History of Violence) and Kiefer Sutherland (TVs 24).
Dark City Blu-ray If you’re a fan of brooding comic-book antiheroes, got a nihilistic jolt from The Crow (1994), and share director Alex Proyas’s highly developed preoccupation for style over substance, you might be tempted to call Dark City an instant classic of visual imagination. It’s one of those films that exists in a world purely of its own making, setting its own rules and playing by them fairly, so that even its derivative elements (and there are quite a few) acquire their own specific uniqueness. Before long, however, the film becomes interesting only as a triumph of production design. And while that’s certainly enough to grab your attention (Blade Runner is considered a classic, after all), it’s painfully clear that Dark City has precious little heart and soul. One-dimensional characters are no match for the film’s abundance of retro-futuristic style, so it’s best to admire the latter on its own splendidly cinematic terms. Trivia buffs will be interested to know that the film’s 50-plus sets (partially inspired by German expressionism) were built at the Fox Film Studios in Sydney, Australia, home base of director Alex Proyas and producer Andrew Mason. The underground world depicted in the film required the largest indoor set ever built in Australia.
Dark City Blu-ray Reviews
The trailers for Dark City suggested a film so complex and impeneterable to leave the viewer rather confused at its conclusion, yet in execution the film makes far more sense than the intriguing montage in the trailer.
Set in a dark world–literally dark, as no one seems to remember being out during the day–the film focuses on John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who awakens amnesiac to find a murdered woman nearby. Soon thereafter pursued by the police (led by William Hurt), he must solve the mystery of his missing memories and eerie pursuers.
Helped along the way by a woman claiming to be his wife (Jennifer Connelley) and a pendactic psychiatrist (Kiefer Sutherland), Murdoch learns that his pursuers are a race of aliens with the power to warp reality with their minds who continually change the city and the memories and even lives of the people inhabiting it in an experiment designed to save their lives. Murdoch has developed their same power to “tune” and save humanity from the aliens’ machinations.
The film’s theme of questionable reality–carried across on two levels as both human memories are manipulated and the physical world itself changed on a nightly basis–is done fairly well if somewhat less successfully than the in the Matrix.
Replete with dark imagery suiting the film noir genre and quite at home in Blade Runner, the movie makes for a stunning visual performance. The aliens are masterfully done as frightening and eerie outsiders. My only complaint is that I was able to grasp the film’s actions and meanings on a first viewing with little difficulty; I had expected to come out with the sense of, “What the heck?!” that would require two or three viewings to fully digest the film’s depth. Yet that aside, the film is still a definite watch for any fans of film noir or reality-questioning sci-fi.
The DVD includes a number of special features to sweeten the deal, including two commentary tracks, the theatrical trailer (whose music unfortunately didn’t make it into the film), an isolated score track, and more. The video and audio transfers are crisp and clean.
Dark City is the equivalent of taking a train through a tunnel with the proverbial light at the end being either an oncoming train or the end of the tunnel – except the tunnel is a nasty horror film roller coaster loop without the majority of the gore and bad plot. (The light analogy is apt; Dark City is one of only two films I know of where no scene takes place in daylight, at least until the end of the film.)
If you’ve never seen this, the plot is a man (Rufus Sewell with an American accent reminscent of Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers) accused of murder being forced to explore the underside of his city – and realizing something is very, very wrong in the very structure of the universe when memories don’t add up. Feared and then supported by his wife (Jennifer Connelly as she just started becoming a superstar), helped at times by an amoral ‘psychatrist’ who has a lot more up his sleeve than therapy (Kiefer Sutherland acting for a change!), he is pursued by a droll detective (William Hurt) as they question the reality and realize the horror of their lives.
The plot works here for several reasons, unlike much in this genre. The heroes are worth rooting for and clearly delineated against the real bad guys, and the explore-the-world theme that often overcomplicates plotlines this gets pulled along at a quick pace by at first the murder charge and then later the pursuit by the real baddies. Give the writers credit too – unlike the Matrix, the world created here doesn’t borrow extensively from myth and religion and you don’t need to watch five times to get the point. Cinematography is out of this world – and one of the reasons this picked up comparisons to Lang’s Metropolis – and the sound track featuring a ton of brass, bass, drums and weeping violins fits.
The DVD transfer has good blacks (important given that whole never see the sun thing) and I happened to actually learn things about films in general from the Ebert commentary.
A good chaser of this genre after watching the last couple of Matrix films. Recommended.
