Visually intensive

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 1999)

Dark City is the kind of movie you either love or hate. I have spoken both to people and read reviews that tore it down for being "soulless" and "boring" and others who felt it was the best film of the year. Like it or not, it is hard to be indifferent to it.
The movie takes place in a nameless city that appears always to be enshrouded in darkness. It is never daytime in this place. Every day, at midnight, the entire city crawls to a halt, and its residents awaken to new identities and lives, without knowing they were ever anyone else. One of these citizens is played by Rufus Sewell, who awakens in a bathtub in a strange apartment, without any knowledge of who he is or how he got there. His confusion and fear are heightened by the presence of a dead body in the bedroom. A stranger calls him, warning him to leave at once. Strange, deathly pale men wearing black are coming up the elevator to get him.
He stumbles across his wallet, and learns his name is John Murdoch, although names in this reality mean little; they are as transitory as the identities that the people have from day to day (or night to night, as the case may be). He has a wife, or so it seems, played by Jennifer Connelly in a luminous performance. She is distressed over his apparent lunacy and the possibility that he may be a murderer. Is he? Murdoch himself cannot be sure, but the detective assigned to the case is suspicious, not of Murdoch, because he senses he is not a killer, but of the circumstances. What is he supposed to think about the case when his predecessor went mad, drawing bizarre spirals all over his room?
John witnesses what others do not, the midnight transference of memories from one person to the next, and the frightening warping of the city in twisting, wrenching gasps emanating from below the ground. Deep in the bowels of the city, the Strangers, the pale men in black, think these changes into shape using the power of the mind, which they call "chooning".
It soon becomes apparent that John Murdoch can choon as well. How did he get this ability? What is the purpose of the Strangers and their twisted experiments? The movie answers these questions, but the heart of the movie is in the visuals, which are as intensive and refreshing as anything I have seen. Special effects in movies have become threadbare exercises in what we have seen many times before, but this movie displays vast and sweeping visuals that are a feast for the eyes. The Strangers are terrifying in their conformity and lack of emotion, and the scariest is a child with homicidal tendencies. The human players are well-drawn, and the city is a dark nightmare of wet streets and flickering lights and grungy alleys. Dark City is a demonstration of what happens when filmmaker's imaginations are allowed to run wild.