Dark City, the new film from Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, isn't technically based on Dick, but in most regards it's closer in spirit to his works than any of the official adaptations. It opens with a setup that is both classic film noir and perfectly Dickian: John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell, the hunk from Cold Comfort Farm) awakens in a strange hotel room with no idea how he got there or, for that matter, who he is. A phone call warns him to leave at once; he escapes just before the arrival of a bunch of sinister, deathly pale men, who look precisely like Christopher Lloyd's Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (In other scenes, they're indistinguishable from the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
In fairly short order, Murdoch is being chased by both the Strangers (as the film comes to refer to these weird ghouls) and the police, led by the accordion-playing detective Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), who suspects him of a series of murders. Murdoch can't be sure he's not guilty, even as he begins to recover brief flashes of memories, helped along by his torch-singer wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and by his "therapist," the bizarre Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland).
The question the film gradually poses, however, is not "What will Murdoch's memories be?" but "Are these his memories or someone else's? And would it make any difference?"
Little by little, both Murdoch and the viewer begin to notice that there's something, well, a little off about the milieu where all this is taking place. Everybody seems to remember a place called Shell Beach, but no one can quite recall how to get there. And--in what is a droll comment on noir cinematography--we realize that it's always night. "When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?" Murdoch asks Bumstead, who doesn't quite want to admit that he can't remember.
Indeed, the more that Murdoch and the audience discover about what's going on, the less clear it becomes that anything in Dark City's world is to be taken at face value. The film passes out of the realm of such amnesiac noir fare as Mirage, Night Without Sleep and Somewhere in the Night, through the quasi-science-fictional Groundstar Conspiracy, and all the way into the world of Dick's Time Out of Joint and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
It would be tough to discuss Dark City in much more detail without giving everything away, were it not for the fact that the trailers and the ads may have already done so.
Dark City is full of provocative concepts, but like most films that attack metaphysical concerns head-on, things have become a tad too jumbled by the end to be altogether satisfying. It's a problem built into the subject matter. In truth, even Dick's books often felt like cheats at the end. To build a plot around inherently unsolvable questions is to paint oneself into a corner.
The performances are a mixed bag, although their weak points, like the film's derivative visual elements, are almost mandated by the story itself. That is, we never really get a handle on anybody's personality, since there are, by definition, no real personalities to get a handle on. Murdoch may or may not even be Murdoch.
The one character whose function in the story suggests a true identity is Schreber, who could have provided a surer foothold for audience identification. But either Proyas or Sutherland (or both) made the odd decision to have Schreber be the least real character of all. It's hardly the actor's best work: Schreber limps around with a twisted face, an accent and an unnatural, contraction-free mode of speech, like some kind of over-the-top amalgam of Peter Lorre, Oscar Homolka and Dwight Frye in a grade-Z horror movie. It's not clear whether the portrayal is supposed to be funny, but funny it is.
This all said, Dark City is immensely entertaining, as well as visually dazzling; the film's look is something like The Crow, but even more imaginative. Proyas has obviously looked long and hard at a wide range of foreign films--most obviously City of Lost Children and Zentropa--and he's assimilated their influences into his own idiosyncratic version of an American-style noir.
Dark City.
Written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. Directed by Alex Proyas. Starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, Colin Friels and Ian Richardson.
