But, more so than the editing, the cinematography of Dariusz Wolski stands out (especially by contrasting the warm browns, greens, and yellows of the city’s overworld to the grays and blues of its underworld), for while Dark City has many influences, it transcends them all, and becomes more the influence than the influenced. In this way, it is a work of art that is a ‘bottleneck.’ It takes all that came before and reconfigures it so that it influences all that came later. Bottleneck art and artists are almost always a sure sign of greatness. Walt Whitman did it in poetry, Henrik Ibsen did it in drama, and films like The Birth Of A Nation, Citizen Kane, and 2001: A Space Odyssey did it in film. It also has, in over a decade, never had a film come close to it. The Matrix? Please — video game pabulum. Look at Blade Runner or any other Philip K. Dick-based films, like Total Recall or Minority Report. Again, these are children’s films in comparison, and lacking in character development. They are films that are truly plot-driven, not character driven, and this is why they usually peter out before the film’s end. And even if they do maintain themselves throughout the film, they are mostly forgotten soon afterward.
But Dark City is also superior to other films considered classic forebears. Metropolis, for all its impact, is still a silent film and slave to the dramatic conventions of that day; there is no emotional realism. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is too plainly a cartoon and comedy to be considered any real influence. Nosferatu, the silent Fritz Lang version (or even Werner Herzog’s 1970 re-visioning), and other German Expressionist films, have obvious visual parallels to Dark City (most notably the Max Schreck-like Strangers), but are simply not as narratively rich.
Film critic Roger Ebert, who is often oblivious to narrative pluses and minuses, is well known for having declared Dark City 1998’s best film. I would likely give that to Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (at least for American releases), but he is correct when he notes the influence of American painter Edward Hopper on the film, as well as this observation:
Notice an opening shot that approaches the hotel window behind which we meet Murdoch. The window is a circular dome in a rectangular frame. As clearly as possible, it looks like the ‘face’ of Hal 9000 in 2001. Hal was a computer that understood everything, except what it was to be human and have emotions. Dark City considers the same theme in a film that creates a completely artificial world in which humans teach themselves to be themselves.
The shot may not be a direct quotation from the Kubrick masterpiece, but it does echo my earlier claim that both this film and The Strangers are thoroughly drenched in the cinema of the 20th Century, and seem to have recreated the city in their idée fixee of cinema realities past.
Article comments
1 - Kevin
Jesus H Christ; I thought it was good that someone reviewed the director's cut of Dark City, but SEVEN FUCKING PAGES?? Think anyone reads all that besides you? Fuck no; learn how to write for an audience brainiac.