Every week, Shelf Life sees Tom White select and talk about a movie that lives on his DVD shelf, one he thinks we should all see.
With The Crow, director Alex Proyas made a huge mark on the main stream showing a lot of promise with his signature style and dark tone. While the likes of I, Robot and Knowing have seen his styleget diluted throughout the years, it was his third feature that showed Proyas at his best, and gave us a great sense of what he could achieve. That movie was 1998's Dark City.
One full year before The Matrix (which also used some of the same sets), Dark City explored many similar themes and even shared many plot beats with The Wachowski's sci-fi classic, but while that movie went big and flashy, Dark City went smaller and deeper, with Rufus Sewell's John Murdoch discovering the city he calls home is a just a stage for the mysterious Strangers to control and experiment with. Inspired by German expressionism, the city itself is a character, one gigantic set that casts an imposing shadow over proceedings. It is the perfect setting for Proyas to let loose in, and it is the best showcase for his style to date. It owes a lot to Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's City of Lost Children, but Proyas twists these inspirations to his needs and makes them his own. It feels like the logical step of what he showed us in The Crow, and makes Dark City feel totally unique and mind blowing. There are so many fantastic moments in Dark City, from the city reshaping itself according to the Strangers will (referred to as tuning) to the perfectly played revelation of the city's origin, that it requires multiple viewings. The first few will be trying to get a handle on what is going on, but once that is done, the rest will be just letting the luscious visuals and atmosphere wash over you again and again.
To go too much into the plot of Dark City would be to do the film a disservice, as there are many twists and surprise packed into its run time. The story tackles some really big ideas, from the nature of reality to what it truly means to be human, but it is presented on a refreshingly small scale. It presents itself initially as noir-ish mystery, as Murdoch must discover why he remembers a murder he didn't commit, and as the layers are peeled away the larger story reveals itself, with The Strangers looming large in the background. Sewell's Murdoch is the perfect protagonist, in the dark as much as we are, and feeling real and human to his reactions to the strange world he finds himself in. But the movies mysterious antagonists are the ones who end up stealing the show. Pale skinned and decked out in identical black fedoras and trench coats, their involvement grows as the mystery unravels, reaching an incredibly satisfying and bombastic conclusion as Murdoch confronts their leader Mr. Book (Ian Richardson).
Being the strange, little oddity it was, Dark City had trouble on it's way to the big screen, with New Line Cinema demanding the addition of a explanatory voice over afraid that audiences would find the film confusing. Despite a majority of positive reviews, Dark City performed poorly at the box office, just about making back it's $27 million budget. Thanks to Roger Ebert and the home release of the movie, it finally received the success it deserved and became an instant cult classic. It's a movie that deserves to be seen, a visually stunning example of a director on the top of his game.