Dark City

Dark City

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DVD Reviews of Dark City

DVD Review: Movie doesn' t live up to its potential-Commentary Excellen
Summary: 3 Stars

Like Blade Runner, Dark City is a movie is as much about its setting as its storyline. And what a setting it is! A unnamed noir-era, metropolis in which buildings bloom from the depths according to the mental machinations of the Strangers, a pasty faced, leather trenchcoat wearing bunch of Nosferatu types from below.

The Strangers are involved in a great experiment. They are manipulating human beings during nightly periods of induced sleep, putting them into various settings, injecting them with memories mixed like cocktails by the athsmatic Dr. Schreber (Keifer Sutherland), and watching the result. This is a potentially very interesting concept, and ripe for inventive exploration. And before the wheels of the plot take over, it succeeds- we are drawn by the potential of, say, exploring the core nature of humanity stripped of context.

Alas, the movie stops short of this. Director Proyas, like the Strangers, seems to want the characters to behave Just-So- that is, well within their assigned noir archetypes- and becomes ill at ease when they stray from their appointed behaviors. Thus, we are treated to what seem to be bland, one dimensional performances and very functional dialog.

As Roger Ebert points out in his fine commentary track on the DVD, the choice of acting style in the film was, perhaps, deliberately cold, deliberately blank, as the main plot point of the films is that the characters have all been injected with canned memories and have not had time to develop any of their own. The fact that all the human characters are pre-programmed by the Strangers (who presumably did their resarch by watching old noir films) on how to act, how to behave and how to think, seems to me a convenient excuse for the cliched dialog and coming out of their mouths. This would have been fine had I sensed that, as the movie rushed forward toward its apocalyptic conclusion, the now free and independent characters were somehow, like Blade Runner's "replicants", budding strange new emotions of their own. Unlike Ebert (whom I consider to be my favorite film critic), I did not find the characters to be warming up in any way. And I felt no warmth or concern for them by the time the movie crashed headlong into its personality obliterating finale.

Here's something to help you understand what I mean when I state that this film is lacking invention. In his commentary, Ebert enthusiastically points up a scene in which we see the Strangers forcing a rags-to-riches transformation on a couple eating dinner. Their dinner table grows from the size of a card table to something that would be not out of place at San Simeon (recalling a similar transformation in Citizen Kane) and their home grows from a low rent apartment, to a palatial mansion replete with polished stone columns and candleabras. This is potentially interesting. In such a transformation, one could explore how humans change themselves to adapt to their station in life. But, since the both the behaviors and the settings of the characters are pre-programmed (and the dialog is cliched), the scene has no emotional or ironic impact. We feel no suprise or delight when the characters behave exactly as one would expect given their setting- lower class, they act hammy, upper class, they suddenly become east-coast WASPs. This is, of course, a requirement of the script. However, with a bit more "invention" the scene could have had a touch of warmth and humor. Would it not have been far more interesting, and potentially illuminating, to have had the personalities of this couple left "lower-class" while their living conditions change? Perhaps, after a bit of adjustment, the characters would settle in to an upper class manner, but the initial cognitive dissonance would be source of much information about human nature.

The Strangers, and Proyas, are not very clever experimenters.

A few words about Keiffer Sutherland, whose narration the film found a need to fall back on from time to time to explain to us what has been happening. I have no gripe with Mr. Sutherland in general, but his performance in this movie left me questioning his judgement as an actor- and Proya's as a director. All... his... dialog... is... deli..vered... in... a... monot... o... nous... gasping... cadence... that... grows... old... before... the end... of the first... reel. It sounds less like Athsma, with which I'm familiar, than a malfunction in Steven Hawking's voice synthesizer. I didn't believe for a minute that this was anything but an clumsy affectation. I would have loved to see Dr. Schreber pause just once to excuse himself to take a much needed puff on an Ventolin inhaler.

Despite my disagreement with Roger Ebert on the merits of the film as a whole, I find his commentary track to be among the best I've ever heard- no less than a treatise on how to watch a good movie. Unlike many commentary tracks, where a director or editor or screenwriter injects a comment every minute or so, often merely behind the scenes gossip, Ebert talks pretty much for the entire film. He postulates on the decision making processes of the director, and points up scenes that he thinks work well, and decisions that he likes (most of them he likes...) It is clear that he loves this movie and his enthusiasm is great fun to listen to. (Indeed, he turned down payment for his services to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest and more credibly promote this "overlooked gem.")

So, the bottom line is, as a movie, Dark City is disappointing- a "coulda' been". As a DVD, however, it's worth a look.

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