DARK CITY directed by Alex Proyas (USA, 1998)
My favourite ever episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is ‘Hush’ where a ghoulish group known as The Gentlemen invade Sunnyville and steal everyone’s voices so selected victims can’t scream as their hearts are cut out.
These scary figures look similar to the pallid hairless aliens known as ‘the strangers’ in Dark City and move the same way; floating rather than walking to seek out their prey.
This movie is a neo-noir fantasy sci-fi horror mystery by the director of The Crow. It shares the bleak underworld vibe of his earlier cult classic without the same killer soundtrack. It looks very stylish but lacks any real sense of menace – more like a weird dream than a horrific nightmare.
The ‘strangers’ are from a dead planet and in an attempt to keep their race alive they have relocated to Earth. Their ultimate goal is to find and capture the souls of humankind.To help fulfill this dastardly mission they employ the fidgety Dr Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a mad scientist working against his own kind for reasons that are never fully explained – what’s in in for him?
Schreber speaks English with stilted precision and is incapable of using contracted forms so will say things like “You do not know what you are doing”. Armed with a medieval style needle he extracts memories from people’s brains while they are asleep. This task is made easier because which at midnight everybody is rendered comatose by some fancy tuning device the aliens use (“Let the tuning commence”).
Our hero is John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) who is immune from this process and, for good measure, possesses the same psychokinetic powers as the aliens. He has also lost some of his memories and wants them back. “I’m still me and I’m not a killer” he affirms in defiance of the strangers’ attempts to take over his head and frame him for a series of murders.
On his trail, until he sees who the true enemies are, is William Hurt who sleep walks through the part of the inelegantly named Inspector Frank Bumstead. Jennifer Connelly as Murdoch’s wife looks good but doesn’t really convince as a sultry nightclub singer.
The chief aliens who go through the menacing motions are Richard ‘Rocky Horror Show’ O’Brien as Hand and Ian Richardson is Book (names are not their strong point!). These speak with the formality of thespians in fancy dress :“We require a more practical link to his present whereabouts”.
All the messing with human headspace and shots of mutating cities looks in parts like a blueprint for Christopher Nolan’s Inception; albeit on a much smaller budget.
The aliens are ultimately foiled because their plan is fundamentally flawed; as Murdoch gleefully points out : “humanity is not in the head”. The implication of this is that the essence of mankind is not an intellectual concept but centred in the heart – maybe The Gentlemen in Sunnyville were on to something after all.
Just wanted to point out a small correction in what you wrote. I’m thinking there is a chance that you didn’t write it exactly as it is purposefully so that you do not spoil the film for people that haven’t seen it yet? Or in the chance that you didn’t pick up these things I was eager to comment on them, so I will mark this as a spoiler. Here goes.
-SPOILER-
The strangers have not come to earth, and they do not extract memories from their subjects.
They have taken humans from Earth to a location that is of their making (not even on another planet) as depicted by the machine running it all (and the Dark City created above it and nothing else) floating in space. The memories they have taken are from the humans they took from Earth and they have a library with such memories (also stated that they are running out or low on memories) with the doctor imprinting new memories from combinations taken from this library into human subjects, creating different lives for all of them so that the ‘Strangers’ can observe and study their actions and so on.
Nobody knows they come from Earth (the doctor was the last person to know and was forced to delete those memories) so their origins are lost to all humans.
So yeah that’s pretty much it. They are not on Earth and they do not extract memories. They took people and memories from Earth and created an experiment in space, and ‘implant’ memories into each subject, creating shared memories in the end as well as a form of no individuality left in humans, further helping their experiment into finding what it is that creates individuality in humans.
Hence why the main character says that these are the memories given to him but they are not who he is, and further helping the plot line that humanity is not found in the mind/memories.
Nice article I liked the read (apart from the small inaccuracies). Loved the film too, had seen it back when it came out and once more a couple days ago. Haven’t seen that Buffy episode though. I would say the resemblance in Dark City looks much more like a generation of Hellraisers, along with similarities it brings to generally plots of the like (Matrix, etc).
Still can’t shake off the heavy feeling that they are left to exist on a place that is so limited and small in the end. But I guess I comfort the idea with the thought that the protagonist could probably go into doing whatever he wants hence grow the scale of this new city into a new version of Earth.