Another in the occasional search for underappreciated, if not neglected sci -fi movies. We arrive at Dark City from 1998. In many ways part of that flourish of late nineties unrelentingly dystopian movies. This eventually climaxes in the ground breaking style of The Matrix in 1999. And if you think Dark City owes something to it, well its the other way round. Many sets from Dark City were reused by the Wachowski's. What both are stylistically indebted to, is The City of Lost Children from 1995 directed by Jeunet & Caro. But without any of its genial playful humour left in.
What we are presented with in Dark City is the bleakest of sci fi mixed with a very grubby and puzzle box of a black noir thriller. What is quite laudable in the direction of this movie, is that it is determined to stick doggedly to its vision and guns. However bizzare and unwieldy its heavy storyline and highly wrought style might become. It chooses not to soften its impact with sentimentality or clichéd ways out of its seemingly impossibly weighty confection.
A man (Rupert Sewell) awakens to find himself naked in a bath, in the corner of the room a chair with his cloths on. He gets dressed. He finds the body of a prostitute dead, covered in bloody red spirals scored into her skin. A phone rings, a man's voice claiming to be his Doctor ( Keifer Sutherland ) tells him he must run because they are about to arrive to capture him. And so he runs, but doesn't know why or what from. He remembers nothing about who he is, even his name eludes him. What has he done, was he responsible for that woman's murder? Are the cloths he's wearing even his?
Expertly crafted, the film feeds its information to you judiciously, in little parcels of significant detail. Not really revealing the truth till pretty much near the end. A man in search of his identity in a hostile austere environment he can't quite understand, is quintessential Kafka. And Dark City's crowded urban landscape of ramshackle skyscrapers, is visceraly threatening. Sulphur lit in its strange perpetual night. This is a place where everyone's nightmares could live.
A quite brilliant movie, probably even at the time quickly superseded by The Matrix's pseudo philosophical storyline and funky mind boggling set piece technical effects. Because of the way the subsequent Matrix films over extended and completely trashed its rationale, maybe it doesn't hold up as well as Dark City does now. Perhaps one movie was enough, saying all it needed to.
CARROT REVIEW - 7/8
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