Great

Rating: 9/10 (29 July 2009)

Dark City is a film that will only grow with time, for not only is it a bottleneck work of art, but it's a transcendent film. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it transcends the limits of sci fi. Similarly, claims that the film is Gothic, noir, Expressionist, etc. are similarly shortsighted, as well are those which liken the film's narrative to Kafka or Orwell. The clear progenitor of this film is in fact Rod Serling, creator of the television show The Twilight Zone. But the film makes use of imagery from sources few have ever noticed- from campy predecessors in science fiction- the scene of Murdoch on The Strangers' wheel is highly derivative of the flying death scenes in Logan's Run, and the early scenes of The Strangers causing the city to sleep for a tuning, with cars in the middle of traffic jammed roads, is a steal straight from the opening scenes of Federico Fellini's 8½. This diversity, however, just proves a point I've long made, that greatness is a difference of kind not merely degree. Great films, and works of art, like Dark City, transcend their natal genres, and join a higher club, for they have more in common with the great films of other genres, than they do with lesser examples of their genre. And, the bottleneck status of Dark City also proves another point. German filmmaker Werner Herzog has long declared that our culture (cinematic or not) is currently starved for images, especially new images for a new age. I've never bought that, and a film like Dark City disproves Herzog's point. Images are always recycled, as are stories, and until mankind gets into outer space and experiences new things, now images are going to be relatively scarce. What I believe Herzog meant, however, was that the old images, stories, and ideas, need to be made re-new, and this is the essence of an artistic bottleneck- be it artwork or artist. The old is all filtered through that bottleneck and re-presented in new ways, mixed with new things, and, most of all, made better. As example, Shakespeare improved upon the dramatic archetypes of Greek tragedies, and the Modern Masters (Ibsen, Shaw, O'Neill) improved on Shakespeare's often one dimensional characters and fleshed them out, and set them in 'real' situations, rather than the soap operatic melodramas Shakespeare could rarely transcend. It is quality, and quality alone, that is the important thing in any work of art, because that is a thing that is not ground to the subjective biases of individuals nor masses, not originality nor sentiment. And in these areas that define what makes a work of art work greatly, Alex Proyas's film Dark City transcends to that rarest circle, greatness, even as, within the limits of its genre it stands alone.nonpareil.