ingredients : man with amnesia who wakes up wanted for murder , dark science fiction city controlled by alien beings with mental powers .
synopsis : what if you woke up one day , and suspected you were not on earth , and instead were part of an experiment in a giant space terrarium manipulated by intergalactic alien zookeepers ?
in dark city john murdoch ( rufus sewell ) has this problem .
dark city starts out like a 1940s noir amnesia detective mystery .
poor john wakes up with amnesia in a hotel room with a dead dame in one corner .
a mysterious phone call tells him to get the heck out of there , and soon enough john is chased all over town by a murderous army of pale people in black trench - coats , as well as by the police , and the dogged inspector bumstead ( william hurt ) . is john a murderer , and what can his missing memories tell him ?
he searches through his own wallet for possible contacts and clues .
but when the clues do n't fit , it does n't just confuse him ; it causes john to go so far as to question the whole nature of reality in the dark city .
to john , something is fishy , and very unreal about this city .
how come
it 's always dark , and nobody seems to remember what they did this morning ?
and how come nobody seems to remember how to leave the city , or how to get to nearby shell beach ?
every night , around midnight , john notices that the whole city enters a state of suspended animation , and at this time , creepy alien experimenters known as the ' strangers ' come out and do nasty things like inject fake memories into people 's heads with big hypodermic needles .
the strangers have the ability to ' tune , ' or warp reality using telepathic powers .
turns out , the city is not on earth at all .
and the reason why john does n't fall victim to the nightly suspended animation , is because he is a human mutation that possesses the same god - like reality - warping abilities as the strangers .
even with the help of scientist dr .
daniel schreber , can john take back the dark city ?
opinion : director alex proyas ( he also directed the crow )
mentions this in the dark city press kit : in films , science fiction is always " used to have big spaceships blow up cities .
i think we 're a little tired of that .
"
according to director proyas , probably the most interesting thing about dark city is its layers .
it 's designed so that you can watch the film over again , and examine it from the perspective of a main character other than murdoch .
it 's a philosophical piece .
cinematic science fiction is basically a thinly disguised shootout between the good humans and the bad aliens ( whether they be klingons , giant bugs , or proponents of the dark side of the force ) .
but science fiction in books reaches beyond the ' shoot - em - up ' level and targets the big questions , questions like who are we ?
what is the human condition ?
what is ethical ?
what would a true human being do ? far from comic book style on the order of spawn , batman , or the mutant ninja turtles , dark city not only features the showdown between good humans and powerful aliens , but it also asks questions worthy of films such as brazil or blade runner .
dark city is what philosophers would call an existentialist screenplay .
a little more than 200 years ago , the world was filled with unhappy peasants - - unhappy because nearly every aspect of their lives was controlled by totalitarian , military , conformist , medieval regimes .
the people took refuge in religion , the idea being that earthly life was a time of suffering , but after death , heaven would be available .
meanwhile , the state used these same ideas to prop up their regimes ; the king was often head of the religion and therefore sanctioned by heaven .
when science finally overturned religion , the medieval dictatorships came tumbling down and were replaced by democratic governments .
but the new fear was that the power of science and experimentation would be used to create a world order as darkly totalitarian as the old .
this is the time period when writers and philosophers such as freud , kant , kafka , nietzsche , and dostoevsky pondered what society should be , and what place the individual had in it .
the existentialists ' in particular wrote about the power of the lone individual against what may be a hostile , indifferent , or alienated universe .
in dark city , when the last dying , defeated alien asks john murdoch why the aliens ' scientific experiments on the human beings ' brains failed , murdoch replies , pointing to his head , " because the human condition is n't located in here .
"
Output: P