On February 27th, 1998, Dark City was given a wide release in theaters. While the movie won praise from critics for its visual flair, it tended to get much poorer marks for human elements. None of the actors was acclaimed for giving a strong performance, the story was widely panned and the film was not much of a financial success, earning a meager $27M worldwide. I was thinking about this a lot earlier this month as Groundhog Day hit its own 25th anniversary. Groundhog Day was a film that was applauded at launch as very acceptable, a “Bill Murray vehicle” through which he could deliver some jokes. That movie, however, has taken on new life as it has aged. It now ranks among the best comedies of all time, according to Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, and much to Desson Howe’s chagrin, it was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress as a significant piece of art. Dark City has not yet received that honor, and may never, but twenty years later, I think it’s a worthwhile time to look back on this movie and see its influences with a sense of perspective. Perhaps we will see that Dark City, too, has grown beyond what we first experienced twenty years ago.
For me, the story of Dark City starts with the trailer, something that Paul can understand. I saw the trailer and it enthralled me. The visuals that the initial reviewers praised are on full display here, and very little of the plot is revealed. This is so unlike some movie trailers where the entirety of the plot is in the trailer. to the contrary, the Dark City trailer merely hinted, but what it hinted at was even more mystery. The trailer is shot a bit like a music video to the song “Sleep Now,” by Hughes Hall, which did not fit into an easy classification I might have had for that kind of music in the late 1990s. After I got home all I could think about was the trailer. The movie I had paid to see, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was secondary, at best. I was so intrigued by these spectral figures in this noir setting that I set about writing my own version of the movie in my head–and then on paper. Needless to say, then, I went to see Dark City as soon as it came out.
Much like the first-run critics, I left the theater disappointed. The story on the screen did not match up with my own in my head. That was the flaw of the mystery, it was a little too wide open. Neither did it beat my expectations, which was a real flaw. If I could create a better story out of the visuals of the trailer than the creative team behind the movie itself could, what was the point? In fact, I was so disappointed that for several months after I largely forgot about the movie; like so many other movies, I would have left it in the dustbin of history if not for one thing: the Baltimore cut.
Many movies have had multiple edits. Dune and Blade Runner are two more classic, often dark, science-fiction movies that have had a long history of multiple edits. Finding the “true director’s cut” for some of these films is tricky business. Dark City‘s director’s cut is not particularly hard to find now, and to Alex Proyas’ credit, he has stayed true to it without attempting to re-edit and improve his film repeatedly all these years later. The Baltimore cut is not the director’s cut. I call it the Baltimore cut because I first saw Dark City in this particular edit at the Baltimore World Science Fiction Convention in August of 1998. Nearly six months removed from the film’s wide theatrical release, it was showing at the convention because it was being considered for the Hugo awards the following year (it would lose to The Truman Show). For some reason, I decided to re-watch the film at that convention. Before the screening, the panelist announced that he would be muting the first minute or so of the movie. This cut out some of Trevor Jones’ amazing score, but it also removed the opening narration/voiceover from Kiefer Sutherland’s character, Dr. Daniel Schrieber. Without this narration, which explains and spoils much of the plot of the movie, the movie was a true mystery again. Even though I knew what was coming, the sense of mystery was back and it made the movie much more enjoyable. I came to the conclusion that the initial voiceover had single-handedly ruined the film. Every time I have shown the movie to a new viewer I have shown the Baltimore cut.
Proyas’ vision did not include the narration, nor is it included in his director’s cut. He added it because New Line, the distributor, insisted on it for financial viability. They claimed the movie otherwise was too convoluted for an audience. New Line may have had a point, but Dark City was never going to be a movie that would succeed in attracting mass-market appeal. By attempting to broaden the appeal to an audience that was unlikely to ever appreciate it, they hamstrung the movie for those who would normally have enjoyed it. This single decision probably helped ensure that Dark City would never get the appreciation it deserved. The director’s cut does also include a few more bits, like some deleted scenes that add extra flavor, but nothing nearly as critical. In some ways the deleted scenes’ removal did help to keep the film tightly focused. Directors are not always in the right when it comes to their editing decisions, though clearly I feel Proyas was correct with the narration edit.
Regardless of the edit, what Dark City inspired is arguably more important than the movie itself. I am particularly fond of the movie, but even those less favorable have noted the importance of the film in how cinema developed over the next twenty years. Two of the most notable callbacks to Dark City are The Matrix (1999) and Inception (2010). The Matrix not only seems to borrow a lot of visual flair from Dark City, but it actually uses some of the sets. New Line is owned by Warner Brothers, which was making The Matrix at around the same time, so to save some money they re-used some of the set pieces in the new film. The Matrix is widely hailed as a landmark film, and it, like Groundhog Day, is in the National Film Registry. Many of the filming techniques were definitely revolutionary. “Bullet time” has no precedent in Dark City, but much of the feel of The Matrix can be traced back to Proyas’ film. Christopher Nolan called out Dark City much more directly as a thematic influence for his vision of Inception. This is most obvious in the city-building bending visuals that Nolan created for his dream worlds. These visuals were then replicated and re-used even more recently in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. All of this hails back to the visual effects of the “nighttime” tuning of Dark City, as the buildings morph and twist themselves in and out of position.
The visual panache of the movie is undeniable, so it is not surprising that those would be what were emulated and referred to later by other films. But the plot is no slouch, either, despite critics’ misgivings. It attempts to answer some very difficult questions. What makes us human? Are we more than the sum of our memories? The answers the film provides are perhaps a bit cliched, but the movie’s greatness lies in the asking, not in the answers.
Critics also took the dialogue and the acting to task. Proyas directed and co-wrote the dialogue, so much of the “blame” here falls to him. He is a capable director, but not as talented as might have been needed for a film as ambitious as Dark City. Another take, however, is that he under-directed on purpose. There is something fundamentally wrong with the people living in the city of Dark City. They are products of a terrible experiment, and while they have retained a fundamental humanity, they are perpetually confused. They live their lives going through the motions because somehow they know that they are not living in reality. This confusion bleeds through into their actions. In general, the liveliest performances come from the secondary characters, the ones who are convinced that they are living their true life, without that confusion. And the major characters without this confusion,1 The Strangers, are unattached emotionally because they are alien. Naturally, their presence in the film will feel inauthentic, or inhuman. The sole exceptions in the cast’s ability are Mr. Book, where Ian Richardson’s acting chops pull through an amazing performance, and Mr. Hand, where Richard O’Brien’s flirtation with humanity transform him from alien to monster.
I also want to call particular attention to William Hurt’s role as Inspector Bumstead. Bumstead arrives in the movie with a thud. His hard-boiled detective reviews a murder scene with an emotional detachment suitable for the noir genre, but as he unravels the mystery, his character gains life. Every scene he takes part in he grows closer to a truly human character. Are these examples of under-direction, or perhaps are they examples of the director knowing his material well enough to let the characters grow in sequence with their environment.
Finally, I previously mentioned that the Baltimore cut required sacrificing some of Trevor Jones’ score. I want to finish with this. The score for Dark City is a masterpiece. Jones has done several other iconic scores, including Dances with Wolves and The Labyrinth, though David Bowie always manages to get top billing for the music on that soundtrack. Dark City is likely Jones’ finest work, however, as the atmosphere of Dark City relies entirely on his score in many cases. The film has several scenes with very little or no dialogue and the visuals rest solely on the emotional weight of his music. It is Jones’ score that allows the visuals to be impressive, rather than gaudy.
Twenty years on, I think it is time for a general acknowledgment that Dark City was actually a great film. As with many other great films, it wasn’t recognized as great at the time. It needed to ferment and age for us to recognize it as something more than we had realized. For me, it took multiple viewings. It might be that way for others as well, but few gave the movie a second chance. The solitary voice crowing for this movie to be recognized as great, even in 1998, was the film critic, Roger Ebert. Ebert called Dark City his best film of 1998 and added it to his “Great Movies” list a few years before he passed away. Before he tragically lost his ability to speak, Ebert also provided a commentary track on the original DVD release, a task he only did for a few other films, including the classically great and universally acclaimed films Casablanca and Citizen Kane.
While Dark City may not be a cinematic masterpiece, it definitely deserves stronger consideration as an excellent film, and is more than worthy of your time to revisit, even if you watched it once before and were disappointed.
Nice review. A good movie.