Photo Credit: New Line Cinema
Rufus Sewell stars as John Murdoch in the 1998 film "Dark City."
Sam Zaghoul, Features Editor
October 31, 2012
Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Top Stories, TV
What happens when you mash together German expressionism, film noir, and science fiction? You get the non-existent word ?Germanexpressionismfilmnoirsciencefiction.?
But if you want to watch a movie with all of these elements blended together like a cinematic smoothie, you should go see Dark City. The movie starts with man named John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell)-at least, he thinks his name is John Murdoch. He doesn?t remember anything before waking up in a hotel room-which is also occupied by a dead Jprostitute. After receiving a phone an anonymous phone-call telling him to leave the hotel immediately,he is perused by several odd pale men, known as ?the strangers?.
The strangers control the city, mind, body, and soul. Every few hours they cause everything in the city to stop, and they alter the city to their whims-buildings are raised out of the ground, streets are rearranged,and people are placed into whole new lives, with the appropriate memories inserted. A janitor could wake up as a king and never know the difference.
John tries to discover what?s going on, he encounters the woman who might be his wife (Jennifer Connelly), a police inspector (William Hurt) trying to solve a serial killer case, and a mysterious doctor (Kiefer Sutherland) who seems to know more than he lets on.
The movie is visually spectacular, the city being this nightmarish, art deco entity, and an exaggeration of New York or Chicago on a cold summer?s night during the height of the 30s or 40s, familiar yet alien. It?s like you?re seeing a coiling, monolithic concert serpent. It reminds me of the movie Metropolis or Tim Burton?s rendition of Gotham City (that?s a good thing, by the way).
The story is suspenseful and eerie, with action, romance, and generally weirdness. With this high praise, it should come to no surprise that one of the men who worked on the script was David Goyer, of Batman Begins and the Blade trilogy fame. The acting is moody and dramatic, but not inappropriately so.
In fact, the only real problem I have with the movie isn?t really the movie fault; some executives tacked on a monologue that spoils the plot at the beginning of the film, because they assumed that the average movie goer is an idiot. There are two ways to avoid it: get the director?s cut or mute the movie ?till there is a close up on a pocket watch.
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