Dark City (1998 film)  

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Dark City is a 1998 science fiction film written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, and directed by Proyas. It stars Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jennifer Connelly. While not a box office hit, it has a considerable reputation, with film critic Roger Ebert a particularly big fan.

The story concerns a man waking in a hotel room with no memory, which soon proves to be but one of many troubles. He is sought by police, who believe him to be a serial killer, and also by a group of mysterious men with psychokinetic powers. Furthermore, something appears to be wrong with the world at large: time, memory, and identity behave in unusual ways.

Contents

Plot

John Murdoch awakens in a hotel bathtub, suffering from amnesia. He receives a phone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber, who urges him to flee the hotel to evade a group of men who are after him. In the room, Murdoch discovers the corpse of a ritualistically murdered woman along with a bloody knife. He flees the scene, just as the group of pale men in trenchcoats (later identified as "the Strangers") arrive.

Following clues, Murdoch learns his own name and finds out he has a wife named Emma; Police Inspector Frank Bumstead also wants Murdoch as a suspect in a series of murders committed around the city, though he cannot remember killing anybody. Pursued by the Strangers, Murdoch discovers that he has psychokinesis—the ability to alter reality at will—which the Strangers also possess, and refer to as "tuning". He manages to use these powers to escape from them.

Murdoch explores the anachronistic city, where nobody seems to notice the perpetual nighttime. At midnight, he watches as everyone except himself falls asleep as the Strangers physically rearrange the city as well as change people's identities and memories. Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach: a town familiar to everyone, though nobody knows how to get there, and all of his attempts to do so are unsuccessful for varying reasons. Meanwhile, the Strangers inject one of their men, Mr. Hand, with memories intended for Murdoch in an attempt to predict his movements and track him down.

Inspector Bumstead eventually catches Murdoch, acknowledging that Murdoch is most likely innocent, and by then has his own misgivings about the nature of the city. They confront Schreber, who explains that the Strangers are extraterrestrials who use corpses as their hosts. Having a hive mind, the Strangers are experimenting with humans to analyze their individuality, hoping that some insight might be revealed that will help their own race survive.

Schreber reveals that Murdoch is an anomaly who inadvertently awoke when Schreber was in the middle of imprinting his latest identity as a murderer. The three embark to find Shell Beach, but it exists only as a poster on a wall at the edge of the city. Frustrated, Murdoch and Bumstead break through the wall, revealing outer space. The men are confronted by the Strangers, including Mr. Hand, who holds Emma hostage. In the ensuing fight, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole into space, revealing the city as a deep space habitat surrounded by a force field.

The Strangers bring Murdoch to their home beneath the city and force Schreber to imprint Murdoch with their collective memory, believing Murdoch to be the culmination of their experiments. Schreber betrays them by instead inserting false memories in Murdoch which artificially reestablish his childhood as years spent training and honing his tuning skills and learning about the Strangers and their machines. Murdoch awakens, fully realizing his skills. He frees himself and battles with the Strangers, defeating their leader Mr. Book in a psychokinetic fight high above the city.

After learning from Schreber that Emma has been re-imprinted and cannot be restored, Murdoch exercises his new-found powers, amplified by the Strangers' machine, to create an actual Shell Beach by flooding the area within the force field with water and forming mountains and beaches. On his way to Shell Beach, Murdoch encounters a dying Mr. Hand and informs him that they have been searching in the wrong place—the mind—to understand humanity. Murdoch rotates the habitat toward the star it had been turned away from, and the city experiences sunlight for the first time.

He opens a door leading out of the city, and steps out to view the sunrise. Beyond him is a pier, where he finds the woman he knew as Emma, now with new memories and a new identity as Anna. Murdoch reintroduces himself as they walk to Shell Beach, beginning their relationship anew.

Cast

Similarities to other works

The film's style is often compared to that of the works of Terry Gilliam (especially Brazil). Some stylistic similarities have also been noted to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's 1995 film The City of Lost Children, another film inspired particularly by Gilliam (Gilliam had presented Jeunet's and Caro's previous film Delicatessen in North America, another film by Jeunet and Caro that was a deliberate homage to Gilliam's style).

The Matrix was released one year after Dark City and was also filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney using some of the same sets.

Fritz Lang's 1927 movie Metropolis was a major influence on the film, showing through the architecture, concepts of the baseness of humans within a metropolis, and general tone. In one of the documentary shorts featured on the director's cut, the influence of the early German films M and Nosferatu are mentioned.

One of the last scenes of the movie, in which buildings "restore" themselves, is similar to the last panel of the Akira manga. Proyas called the end battle a "homage to Otomo's Akira".

When Christopher Nolan first started thinking about writing the script for Inception, he was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real".


See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Dark City (1998 film)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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