390 - Dark City review

Alex Proyas’ “Dark City” is every bit as much an exemplary example of film noir as it is science fiction. This makes sense, as the best sci-fi films always have something serious to say about the human experience by utilizing extraordinary settings and events. And what sort of film cuts to the core of humanity as often as film noirs do, with their tough-guy ruminations on the things that make us tick?

“Dark City” follows John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who wakes up with amnesia in a gloomy metropolis that just so happens to be controlled by hideous aliens that can alter reality at will. It’s all a big experiment, he’s told by Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, playing the polar opposite of Jack Bauer), who works for the aliens by routinely erasing the memories of everyone in the city and replacing them with new ones. They want to know if humans are the sum of their memories or something else altogether. The question: what is the human soul?

Proyas’ visuals are magnificent, an amalgam of early-20th century America and otherworldly architecture that shifts and warps into whatever the aliens see fit. But beyond the visuals lies one of the more compelling love stories I’ve seen. John discovers that he has a wife named Emma (Jennifer Connelly), but he can’t remember her. In a way, she doesn’t truly remember him either, because the alien’s memory tampering ensures that everyone in the city lives countless lifetimes. But when Emma tells John she loves him, she means it, because the feeling is there. The hive-minded aliens can’t understand this; they treat their subjects like lab rats, and can learn a thing or two about behavior, but are incapable of realizing that it’s our emotions that drive us.

“Dark City” is most often compared to “The Matrix,” an obvious comparison because of the similarity of the aesthetics, the heady nature (it could likely be argued that the success of “The Matrix” all but annihilated “Dark City’s” position in our culture). But it reminded me more “Memento,” another film noirs concerning memory. Both feature protagonists afflicted with memory loss, kept prisoner of sorts by outside forces manipulating their own dearth of knowledge. In the process, they both find themselves compelled by women, stirred by memories and ineffable feelings of loss and love. There must be a great truthfulness to these feelings seeing as two seemingly disparate masterpieces end up treading the same ground, and that the result are so spellbinding.

5 out of 5