Trick of Memory
New director’s cut shines a little light on ‘Dark City’
By Andy Klein
It’s been a little more than a decade since Alex Proyas’s Dark City was released theatrically. It was poorly marketed – the studio made it seem more like a horror film than a noirish, metaphysical science fiction story. Despite some glowing reviews – I had it on my top ten, but, somewhat more importantly, Roger Ebert made it his number one of the year – it only found its true audience slowly through the subsequent DVD release.
Now, New Line Home Video – as one of their last gasps before final absorption into Warner HV – has put out a new “Director’s Cut” edition on both DVD and Blu-ray.
Dark City wasn’t officially based on a Philip K. Dick story, but it’s closer in spirit to Dick (in books like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Time Out of Joint, and A Maze of Death) than any of the official adaptations. Dealing with themes of false reality, constructed identity, and a world manipulated by conspiracy, it was just a little ahead the curve. Within eighteen months of its release, we got The Truman Show, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, the Spanish import Open Your Eyes (later remade as Vanilla Sky) and, of course, The Matrix.
The success of The Matrix way overshadowed whatever memories of Dark City lingered in the public consciousness. Many who discovered Proyas’s film more recently may have assumed it was a knockoff of The Matrix in both concept and look. Ironically, one of the reasons for the visual similarity is that some sequences in The Matrix were shot on Australian sets that had been built specifically for Dark City.
The film opens with a setup that is both classic film noir and perfectly Dickian: John Murdoch (Brit actor Rufus Sewell) awakens in a strange hotel room with no idea how he got there or, for that matter, who he is or why there is a dead prostitute in the room. A phone call warns him to leave at once; he escapes just before the arrival of a bunch of sinister, deathly pale men, who look precisely like Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (though Proyas cites Max Schreck in Nosferatu as the main inspiration).
In fairly short order, Murdoch is being chased both by The Strangers (as the film comes to refer to these weird ghouls) and by the police, led by the accordion-playing Detective Bumstead (William Hurt), who suspects him of a series of murders. Murdoch can’t be sure he’s not guilty, even as he begins to recover brief flashes of his memories, helped along by his torch-singer wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and by his “therapist” – the bizarre Dr. Shreber (Kiefer Sutherland).
Little by little, both Murdoch and the viewer begin to notice that there’s something, well, a little off about the milieu where all this is taking place. Everybody seems to remember a place called Shell Beach, but no one can quite recall how to get there. And – in what is a droll comment on noir cinematography – it seems to always be night. “When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?” Murdoch asks Bumstead, who is reluctant to admit that he doesn’t have an answer.
Indeed, the more Murdoch and the audience discover about what’s going on, the less clear it becomes that anything in Dark City is to be taken at face value. The film passes out of the realm of such amnesiac noir fare as Mirage, Night Without Sleep, and Somewhere in the Night, through the quasi-science-fictional Groundstar Conspiracy, and into the world of Dick, The Matrix, and sheer madness.
If the standard questions in amnesia movies are “Who am I? Could I be capable of murder? What are my missing memories?” Dark City asks “Are these my memories? Or someone else’s? Or no one’s? ... And would it make any difference?” Plus: “What the hell is going on?”
That last question gave studio execs the heebie-jeebies. They were afraid that audiences would be confused at first – apparently missing the point that they were supposed to be confused. It’s a mystery! – one in which things become at least relatively clear by the end. But – much as Ridley Scott had to add the lame voiceover to Blade Runner – so Proyas agreed (apparently with subsequent regrets) to have Sutherland do a voiceover for the opening shot, giving away the whole setup. The central suspense was terribly compromised.
Fans will be delighted to know that the first and most obvious change Proyas has made for the director’s cut is the removal of that voiceover and some other “dumbed down” explanatory material in the early parts of the film.
The director’s cut runs about 11 minutes longer than the original, with most of the expansion coming in little pieces that add grace notes or make the pacing a little less frenetic. Other changes are slightly more obvious: Jennifer Connelly’s singing voice in her nightclub scenes had been replaced by someone else in the theatrical cut; here, her vocals have been restored. She sings fairly nicely; if her voice isn’t slickly professional, well, that makes perfect sense in terms of the plot.
The new disc includes both versions of the movie. Each has its own set of extras; those for the theatrical cut – a commentary track with Proyas and collaborators, a critical commentary track by Ebert, and some trivial text screens – seem to have been ported over, unchanged, from the original 1998 DVD release. The director’s cut is accompanied by an hour and 20 minutes of new documentaries – an intro by Proyas and Ebert, a retrospective making-of, and a more analytical examination of the themes.
There are three new commentary tracks – one by Proyas, one by screenwriters Lem Dobbs (Kafka) and David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight), and one by Ebert. The last should really be described as “newish”: Most of the material is new, but some has been lifted from his earlier track. It is delightful that, despite his recent health problems, he was able to contribute; it takes maybe 10 seconds to get used to his new, softer voice.
Both tracks provide some great info. Anyone who has looked at Sutherland’s exaggerated limp and thought “Walk this way!” will be tickled to hear one of the screenwriters mention the conscious similarity to Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. Ebert gets off some beautiful lines: Of the heavily stylized, Hopper-esque diner, he points out that it’s no real automat; it’s “an automat’s wet dream of itself as an automat.”
As for the look and sound of the new edition: I watched the Blu-ray version and found it substantially better than the DVD, which was, in its time, a state-of-the-art transfer. Dark City is, as the title suggests, dark – way, way dark – and benefits more than usual from a high-def treatment. To be fair, however, buyers might want to take a look at the debate going on at avsforum.com about the processing of the image. Some there find the level of artificial smoothing applied to the image to be unacceptable, with almost no film grain in the texture, leaving faces waxy-looking. On principle, I’m strongly opposed to any meddling that reduces grain, which is one of the central elements that distinguish film from video. But, in practical terms, I was unbothered by the problem here and almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t been pointed out.
The Blu-ray has one of those popup options that provide trivia and facts; it’s particularly useful, because it flags all the changes in the director’s cut. Unfortunately, the way it’s programmed makes it impossible to listen to any of the commentaries at the same time, which would be a fairly natural thing for a second viewing – a minor irritation.
Dark City. Directed by Alex Proyas. Screenplay by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer; story by Alex Proyas. Starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O’Brien, Colin Friels, and Ian Richardson. New Line Home Video, DVD, $19.97; Blu-ray Disc, $28.99.
Published: 09/03/2008
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