(director's cut review) This is what it's like to have a dream of cinema...

Rating: 10/10 (12 May 2016)

Dark City is one of those films that I remember only seeing bits and pieces of over the years; I'd be changing a channel and come upon Dark City and watch maybe a scene, a minute or two, and feel like I was being let in on some secret, or some disturbing dream that I had long ago that stayed in my subconscious. So over the years when I would think back to the film I'd remember these little snatches I'd caught on cable, like Keifer Sutherland explaining something about how memories and time works while going on a rowboat, or some ugly white dudes in big black costumes all in formation. Seeing the film in full finally, I think this was oddly enough an ideal approach: like many of the characters in the film, I have these, well, 'funny' feelings like something is adrift and out of place, that this snatch of a dream of Dark City is something that seems too good to be true as a film. As it turns out, this is one of the richest cinematic experiences from the 1990's.
Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, at least on the surface, it combines genres and does something unique, and in both cases the film language or grammar, the mood and feeling of film-noir (and film-noir may be more of a mood than a 'genre' of course, they stretch from being straight thrillers to psychological horror and even comedies and so on). But with Dark City instead of cartoon comedy we get science fiction. And I don't mean any run of the mill sci-fi, I'm talking sci-fi that's so hard that you can barely break it with a steel brick. The set up seems almost iniquitous as far as film noir tropes go: a man wakes up in a strange place (a hotel, always the best for seedy milieu) and can't remember anything, sees a dead body by the bed, and has to run from the cops and find his identity and what the hell has happened; his wife is a lounge-club singer (cut to lounge and sultry 40's style song); and there's a straight-shooting, curious but hard-liner detective on the case (Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Connolly and William Hurt are these roles respectively, and ideally cast).
When we start to sort of cross the line with sci-fi, though it could still be in film-noir, is with a peculiar doctor played by Kiefer Sutherland (maybe his greatest role, I dare say, certainly the one he gets to have... fun in an odd way) who goes around with a needs and pricks people's heads for... what? And what's with these white bald guys in the black cloaks and trenchcoats? What about that little kid? All of course, we can assume, will be revealed in good time, and from the opening minutes I knew I was in the hands of a confident storyteller, though there was also a part of me that though "hmm, could Proyas and his writers be laying on the noir tropes a bit thick? Could this be like a Sin City where it's all style with only a modicum of substance?" Not that the style is off at all, don't get me wrong, it's almost TOO good. And lo and behold, about 35/40 minutes into the movie, we learn why.
That moment of discovering what's going on - without saying too much, not to spoil per-say just so you can get the excitement of discovery for yourself - somehow time stops all at once... all except for our hero, John Murdoch, who can't seem to understand why time has stopped. But it's at this moment that I fell in love with Dark City, and felt in sync with what it was going for and trying to do. It's a unique vision but it certainly is inspired by films of the past - Metropolis being one (remember the whole head/heart separation, which is part of the villains' master-plan, Blade Runner to an extent), and maybe even going into comic books there's a pulpy (but smart) sensibility that perhaps is why I also thought of Sin City. Why I fell in love with it is that the whole "Style" portion, and I keep using that word but it's for good reason, is due to the substance, it's inter-connected with it, can't have one without the other.
And as we follow John on this trip of self-discovery it's really a wholly philosophical film, about finding what it means to be us and how it connects back into why we would want to watch ANY movie in the first place, to be connected to others and have that empathic connection. So while Proyas and his stellar production team have this world for us to see (one seemingly always at night but not without good reason!) and with this cast that knocks it out of the park, we get to see a little more and more behind the thematic curtains that come with tales drenched on dark city streets and in nightclubs and backrooms and with dames and cops and criminals... and also in the realm of beings from another dimension or something with their chamber of horrors.
Some of the over-stylization may work better for some than others, and by the time it gets to the conclusion things become so wild that it verges into almost being comical (the cgi nears being dated but I'll take it). It's certainly not a movie to watch if you're not ready to engage with it, but it's really among only a handful of movies I can think of (Eraserhead being one) where I felt like I was seeing a motion picture experience that approximated a nightmare.