Dark City (1998)

Director: Alex Proyas

Starring: Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland

A man struggles with memories of his past, which include a wife he cannot remember and a nightmarish world no one else ever seems to wake up from.

‘Dark City’ is so complicated, it is no wonder the film flopped at the box office.

The premise is so complex that it truly is a difficult movie to follow. Our hero is John Murdock (Rufus Sewell). The film starts with him waking up in a bathtub with no memory of how he got there. He gets a call from a Dr Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) who warns him someone is coming for him, and he flees. He learns he’s been at the hotel for three weeks already.

However, later we discover very few events the characters experience are actually real. So, was he at a hotel? Was he there for three weeks? Or were these also just memory implants? The film tells us everyone in the city were brought there by a group of mysterious people called ‘Strangers’, but it never reveals where all the people come from. We do know they are there for an experiment.

You’ll also notice an interesting mix of old and new in the movie, so you can never really tell whether we are in the past or the future, although it mostly looks like the past. This is because the Strangers use fragments of people’s memories to create their own world – or in this instance ‘Dark City’. You’re never really sure what is real and what are memory implants. The world also constantly shifts and reconstructs, constantly changing the look of the city. And every night at midnight everyone and everything comes to a standstill for a while. This is so the Strangers can reset the city.

In short, John is being accused of murdering several women, and he is on a mission to prove his innocence, and find out who he really is. This will not satisfy everyone’s taste due to the complexity of the film. I also can’t really recommend it as a movie night film.

The film’s visuals are excellent and the production design is incredible. Did I enjoy it? Yeah, I suppose I did. Pity it had to be so confusing.

Would I watch it again? No.