Dark City is a 1998 neo-noir science fiction film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Alex Proyas. It stars Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, and Ian Richardson. The screenplay was written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer. In the film, Sewell plays an amnesiac man who, finding himself suspected of murder, attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and a mysterious group known as the "Strangers".
Primarily shot at Fox Studios Australia, the film was jointly produced by New Line Cinema and Proyas's production company Mystery Clock Cinema, and distributed by the former for theatrical release. It premiered in the United States on 27 February 1998 and received generally positive reviews. Roger Ebert, in particular, supported the film, appreciating its art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects, and imagination, and even recorded an audio commentary for the film's home video release.
The film was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and six Saturn Awards. Some critics later noted Dark Citys similarities to and influence on the Matrix film series, whose first installment came out a year later, and the film is now widely considered a sci-fi cult classic.
Concerned that audiences would not understand the film, New Line asked Proyas to add an explanatory voice-over to the introduction, and he complied. When a director's cut of the film was released in 2008, among the changes was the removal of the opening narration.
Plot John Murdoch awakens in a hotel bathtub with 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 and a bloody knife. He flees the scene, just as a group of pale men in trenchcoats ("the Strangers") arrive.
Police Inspector Frank Bumstead, who is investigating murdered prostitutes, identifies Murdoch as a suspect. Following clues, Murdoch learns his name and finds out he has a wife named Emma. When the Strangers corner him, Murdoch instinctively alters reality (an ability the Strangers share and refer to as tuning) to create an escape path for himself.
Murdoch wanders the streets of the city where it is perpetually nighttime but no one seems to notice. When the clock strikes twelve, Murdoch witnesses everyone else fall asleep and the Strangers use tuning to physically rearrange the city's architecture. Afterwards, assisted by Schreber, the Strangers inject selected people with new memories. Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail. The Strangers inject a copy of Murdoch's intended memories into one of their own, Mr. Hand, hoping it will help them predict Murdoch's movements and track him down.
Inspector Bumstead catches Murdoch, though he acknowledges that Murdoch is most likely innocent, as he has misgivings about the city's nature. They confront Schreber, who explains the Strangers' nature. They are extra-terrestrials residing in human corpses who share a hive mind, and are experimenting with humans (whom they have abducted) to analyze individuality in hopes of making a discovery that will help their race to survive. Murdoch, as Schreber reveals, is an anomaly who inadvertently awoke before Schreber could implant his latest identity as a murderer.
Murdoch and Bumstead take Schreber and attempt to reach Shell Beach but instead end up at a poster for the town on a wall at the edge of the city. Frustrated, Murdoch and Bumstead break through the wall, revealing outer space, just before some of the Strangers, including Mr. Hand, arrive with Emma as a hostage. In the ensuing fight, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole and drift out into space, and the city is shown to be 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 instead injects Murdoch with memories of decades of training about the Strangers, their machines, and tuning. Murdoch awakens with his powers fully realized. He frees himself and battles the Strangers, eventually 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 employs his powers, amplified by the Strangers' machines, to create a real Shell Beach within the habitat. On his way home, Murdoch encounters a dying Mr. Hand and informs him that the Strangers searched in the wrong place—the mind—to understand humanity. He rotates the habitat toward the star it had been turned away from and the city experiences sunlight for the first time.
Opening a door leading out of the city, Murdoch steps out to view the sunrise. On the pier in front of him is the woman he knew as Emma, who now has new memories and a new identity as Anna. Murdoch reintroduces himself and they walk to Shell Beach, beginning their relationship anew.
Cast
Anita Kelsey provided the singing voice of Emma Murdoch in the theatrical cut.
Production Influences For Dark City, Proyas was influenced by film noir of the 1940s and the 1950s, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), but also elements from the 60s and 70s were included in the movie. The film has been described as Kafkaesque, and Proyas cited the TV series The Twilight Zone as an influence. Proyas wanted the film, though nominally science fiction, to have an element of horror to unsettle the audience.
Writing Proyas conceived a story about a 1940s detective who is obsessed with facts and cannot solve a case where the facts do not make sense, saying, "He slowly starts to go insane through the story. He can't put the facts together because they don't add up to anything rational". In the process of creating the fictional world for the character of the detective, Proyas created other characters and shifted the focus of the film from the detective (Bumstead) to the person pursued by the detective (Murdoch). Proyas envisioned a robust narrative where the audience could examine the film from the perspective of several characters and focus on the plot.
After writing the first draft of the screenplay by himself, Proyas worked with Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer to create the final script. Goyer had written The Crow: City of Angels (1996), the sequel to Proyas's 1994 film The Crow, and Proyas invited Goyer to co-write Dark City after reading Goyer's screenplay for Blade, which had yet to be released. The Writers Guild of America initially protested against the crediting of more than two screenwriters for a film but relented and credited all three writers.
Design When Proyas finished his preceding film, The Crow, in 1994, he approached production designer Patrick Tatopoulos to draw concepts for the world in which Dark City takes place. The city was built on a set, and no practical locations were used in the film. Describing the city, Tatopoulos said,
The production design included themes of darkness, spirals and clocks. There appears to be no sun in the city's world and spiral designs that shrink when approached were used. The Strangers' large clock does not have any numbers and Tatopoulos said "But in a magical moment it becomes something more than just a clock". The production designer created the city architecture to have an organic presence alongside the structural elements.
The Strangers' lair is a large underground amphitheater, in which a sculpture of a human face hides a large clock and a spiralling device changes the layout of the city above. The set for the lair was in height, while an average set is , and was built on a fairground in Sydney, Australia. The film's budget was approximately $27 million, so the crew used inexpensive techniques to build the set, such as stretching canvas onto welded metal frames. The lair also had a rail conveyance that appeared expensive. Tatopoulos said "We had, obviously, a car built, but we had just one built. We laid some rail for it to ride on. We made a section of corridor that we kept driving through all the time and you end up believing this thing is running along forever". Proyas wanted the rail car to pass various rooms, which was not feasible given the budget, so Tatopoulos and the crew used "replaceable elements and strong design textures" to give the impression it was passing different rooms.
The railway station used in Sydney, was Museum Station. The old Sydney train was provided by SETS - Sydney Electric Train Society.
The Strangers are energy beings who reside in dead human bodies. At the beginning of the design process, the filmmakers considered having the Strangers resemble insects, but they decided the bug appearance was overused. Tatopoulos said one day Proyas "called me and said he wanted something like an energy that kept re-powering itself, re-creating itself, re-shaping itself, sitting inside a dry piece of human shape".
Casting About the character of Mr Hand, Proyas said: "I had Richard in mind physically when I wrote the character, because I had these strange, bald-looking men with an ethereal, androgynous quality", and O'Brien had famously played a similar character (Riff Raff) in The Rocky Horror Show. When Proyas visited London to cast the film, he met with O'Brien and found him suitable for the role.
Daniel P. Schreber, the character portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland, was named after Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge with narcissistic, paranoid psychosis, and possibly schizophrenia, whose autobiographical Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken) (1903) inspired some elements of the film's plot.Kemble, Gary (2009). Movie Minutiae: Dark City (1998). ABCNews. Articulate: Daily talk on arts news and events. 28 March 2009. Retrieved 2010-04-10.Harris, Ken: Film and Conspiracy, in: Knight, Peter (2003). Conspiracy theories in American history: an encyclopedia, Volume 1, ABC-CLIO Inc., Santa Barbara, California, , p. 262Bould, Mark. On the Boundary between Oneself and the Other: Aliens and Language in the Films AVP, Dark City, The Brother from Another Planet, and Possible Worlds , Yearbook of English Studies, University of West of England William Hurt was originally asked to play Dr Schreber before eventually being cast as Inspector Bumstead. Proyas said that Ben Kingsley was one of the original choices to portray Dr Schreber. When Sutherland received the script he didn't understand why it was sent to him, thinking it was a mistake and that they wanted his father Donald.
Soundtrack The film's soundtrack was released on 24 February 1998 by TVT Records.Fawthrop, Peter. "[ Dark City (Original Soundtrack)]". Allmusic. Retrieved 4 March 2006. It features music from the original score by Trevor Jones, and versions of the songs "Sway" and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" performed by singer Anita Kelsey. It also includes music by Hughes Hall from the trailerDark City trailer (QuickTime). Retrieved 4 May 2007. a song by Echo & the Bunnymen that played over the final credits, as well as songs by Gary Numan and Course of Empire that did not appear in the film. The music for the film was edited by Simon Leadley and Jim Harrison.
Release New Line Cinema wanted the filmmakers to consider retitling the film Dark World or Dark Empire to help differentiate it from the recently released Mad City, but Dark City was kept as the title. The film was originally scheduled to be released in theaters on 17 October 1997, then 9 January 1998, and finally 27 February 1998, when it debuted in 1,754 theaters in the United States. The film was released in Australia on 6 August 1998 by Roadshow Films.
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