DARK CITY: DIRECTOR’S CUT [R]
review by Robert Newton

In Alex Proyas’s Dark City, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes one day to find himself in a hotel room with the body of a call girl. He knows not his name, let alone that of the hapless lass. A phone call from the enigmatic Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) alerts him to the impending arrival of “The Strangers,” an alien race capable of manipulating reality with mere thought — “tuning,” it’s called. The Strangers, who, with their pale skin, bald heads and black trench coats, resemble a gang of marauding undertakers, have used their powers to create Edge City, a human Habitrail of sorts in which its denizens are guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment which essentially reduces human nature to a series of Pavlovian stimulus-responses. Struggling for clues, Murdoch finds his alleged wife, adulterous lounge singer Emma (Jennifer Connelly), all the while being pursued by police detective Bumstead (William Hurt) and the menacing Stranger known as Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) who has a special interest in Murdoch, as he, too, can “tune.”

The version of the film that late studio New Line released theatrically in 1998 was not the one that The Crow director Proyas intended. It featured a stilted voiceover narration over its opening, which made it feel a lot like Ridley Scott’s original theatrical version of his 1982 sci-fi classic, Blade Runner, in which Harrison Ford explained everything for the slow folks (which made the film feel a lot like a bad Bogart mystery with flying cars and hot robot chicks). Now, however, with Dark City: Director’s Cut personally supervised by Proyas — and without the voiceover — the film speaks for itself, and audiences can start to appreciate it for the visionary Phildickian wonder that it is.

The 15 additional minutes do not radically alter the film, instead adding depth to a movie that needed more substance to complement its incredible style. As creepy as Sutherland is, with his withered eye and staccato delivery, he turns his menace into sympathy, and Hurt makes what could have been a boilerplate cop character into something more, too. Their extra screen time is needed and welcome, helping ground the film, providing more humanity in a world where such an idea is just a memory (in the minds of its characters and in the discards on the cutting room floor).

Visually amazing (and thoroughly de-grained by New Line’s tech squad), Proyas’s tip-of-the-Strangers’-bowler-hat features an absolutely beautiful noir town, a hybrid of a number of eras, all culled from the memories of the residents of the Strangers’ people farm. The CGI is slightly dated, but in that most of the morphing effects are done in shadows, it is not that glaring. Proyas’s production team certainly earned their paychecks, for what they have created is one of the most visually lush series of sets ever.

While the commentary tracks by Proyas, writers David Goyer and Lem Dobbs and longtime champion Roger Ebert are largely recycled, the most significant addition to the supplementals in this edition is the 80-minute documentary, which combines the 1998 programs Memories Of Shell Beach and Architecture Of Dreams into one glorious, Easter egg-laden film school lecture. It features Proyas, Goyer, Ebert and others, and they thoroughly illuminate the history of the project and its influences. The DVD is worth buying for this feature alone (and the Digital Copy feature that allows storage of a copy of the film on a computer is a nice bonus).

It’s easy to say that Dark City ripped off a number of movies (though remember that the too-similar The Matrix came out the following year). From Blade Runner to the German expressionism of Metropolis to the more recent dark treat The City Of Lost Children, a bit of each finds its way into the film (something that Proyas fully acknowledges). However, Proyas is no one-trick perpetual tribute show like Brian DePalma, and apart from this kind of patchwork being appropriate to the story, the reign that he has here shows that he and his forgotten film are no fluke, and much greater than the sum of their parts.•••

Robert Newton is the editor of WorcesterMovies.