Dark City opens with John (friend of Australian cinema Rufus Sewell, In a Savage Land) waking in a bathtub in a dimly lit hotel room in a dimly lit city, with blood on his forehead, a dead woman in the next room, and no memory of who he is or how he got there. He goes on the lam and starts to piece together who he is, guided by the bread-crumbs left by Dr Schreber, a mad scientist type (friend of Australian cinema Kiefer Sutherland, Paradise Found and lovingly photographed by Dean Semler in Young Guns I and II, The Three Musketeers, and The Cowboy Way). In pursuit of John is a weary (or maybe just sleepy) detective Bumstead (William Hurt) and, separately, a group of pale-faced, black-clad “Strangers” who John witnesses shutting the city down at midnight and “tuning” (that is, altering) the environment and its occupants’ identities.
It’s a terrific setup for one of the very best science-fiction films of the 1990s. Dark City is a film of impeccable visuals (shot by Dariusz Wolski) and craft, with no wasted or throwaway shots. It’s gorgeous, in its baroque way, from its big set pieces to fleeting, second-unit insert shots, such as a cockroach scurrying across a floor. Dark City also moves fast, shorn of superfluous niceties and wrapping in an efficient 100 mins. That’s a few minutes longer than Almost an Angel, and 10 minutes shorter than Burning Man, films that don’t have to tease, reveal, explain, and satisfactorily pay off high-concept sci-fi premises. The film unfolds in ruthlessly short, punchy scenes (edited by frequent Michael Mann and Andrew Davis collaborator Dov Hoenig). Some brisk action and character beats might benefit from a little more room to breathe, but it’s also telling and smart that the scenes which hold the longest, near film’s end, are (i) Schreber finally laying out the backstory to John and Bumstead and (ii) the action finale, both satisfactory payoffs to the propulsive preceding story.
Like Blade Runner and Burton’s Batman—obvious points of reference, though Dark City perhaps leans more towards the latter with its mannerist compositions & score and archer sensibility—Proyas's film is in step with the noir films of the 1940s, and in turn the expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Those influences are evident in the film’s moody lightning, ornate architecture and decor, Sewell’s darting-eyes, near-careening-off-the-rails characterization of the wrongfully-accused hero, Sutherland’s Peter Lorre-esque turn, and Hurt reaching dry acting apotheosis. Jennifer Connelly is a little wasted and has less flavour to play with as John’s wife, but does nice earnest work regardless. Despite constant effects trickery, the settings of Dark City feel physical, tangible, tactile, and in this respect refreshingly at odds with modern blockbusters, and indeed Proyas’s subsequent work, which leans more overtly into CGI.
Proyas is a visual stylist and action director cut from the same cloth as Russell Mulcahy, and has endured some of the same critical slings and arrows, though he hasn’t yet directed DTV or been insulted by Sylvester Stallone. My read on the filmmaker has changed over time. My early, ignorant read was that Proyas was a dark fantasy wunderkind artiste (The Crow, Dark City) who then made a flimsy bubblegum flick (Garage Days) and then sold out and made dumb Hollywood films (I, Robot, Knowing, Gods of Egypt). Little wonder, with such gross simplifications, that Proyas is wary of critics. My viewing of Garage Days in 2017, which I greatly enjoyed, shifted that negative perception, and I saw that film’s amiable goofiness at work in his later Hollywood flicks (Gods of Egypt, after all, features Bryan Brown as an Egyptian god, which could only be, ahem, knowingly tongue in cheek). I’d now argue that goofy sensibility has always pervaded Proyas’s work, substantiated after finally seeing his first film, Spirits of the Air: Gremlins of the Clouds—which for all its artsy pretensions is pretty goofy—and revisiting The Crow; while the pall of tragedy still hangs strong over the film, the goofiness of its Goth operatics is now more apparent, and Brandon Lee’s striking performance brushes up against Jim-Carrey-in-The-Mask zany energy at times. Some of that goofiness also pervades Dark City, in its loopy premise, black comic moments, and Richard O’Brien intertextually bringing some Rocky Horror Picture Show camp to proceedings.
In contrast to Garage Days, the Australianness on this one is, like Elvis, fairly faint, but is there on the fringes in its Antipodean director, some casting choices (Melissa George, Bruce Spence, Colin Friels, and according to IMDb David Wenham, though I did not spot him), its status as a US-Australia co-production, and like The Matrix—released one year later—filming in real locations around Sydney and on the soundstages at Moore Park. Quite coincidentally (spoilers hereafter), it’s the second film featured this month, following The Last Wave, in which rebirth—promised or actual—comes in the form of water eliminating alien—metaphorical or literal—invaders. It’s also the second time in 1998, following Stephen Hopkins’ Lost in Space, that an Australian director left William Hurt lost in space.
This could technically be another Back to School entry, since I studied Dark City at high school in 1999. But unlike Cosi and Looking for Alibrandi, it’s a film I’d seen before and have watched several times since. Watching it again, I was unnerved by the film’s concluding moments in which John, victorious, "tunes" the world to his liking. This sequence, which previously struck me as unequivocally triumphant, carried a sinister, ambiguous undercurrent on this viewing: while the city is liberated from the Strangers, it's now John’s playground to be shaped in his image, potentially beginning a new cycle of control. It speaks to the richness of Proyas’s film that it continues to elicit new impressions and invite reinterpretation umpteen viewings later.
Ben