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| All Images Courtesy: Arrow Video and New Line Cinema |
Dark City has been near the top of my boutique blu-ray wish list for years. Alex Proyas's mind-bending 1998 sci-fi-noir - his carte-blanche follow-up to the massive success of The Crow - has always had a passionate cult following, but has long been overdue for a new restoration and a swanky special edition befitting its cult-classic status. After an ill-fated theatrical release, where the film was set up to fail by a studio who had little faith in its weird, avant-garde vision, Dark City rapidly developed a following on home video via word of mouth, with Roger Ebert championing the film as an unfairly ignored modern masterpiece. And in those early days of the internet, the director's preferred method of watching the film's compromised theatrical cut (keep the audio muted until the opening credits, to avoid the terrible, spoiler-laden voiceover prologue) went viral among film nerds, helping to spur its rise to cult-classic status on video. The film's reappraisal and salvation from obscurity was completed with the release of its director’s cut on DVD in 2008, which undid the disastrous and condescending changes that the studio had forced upon the theatrical version. But in the years since then, the film has found itself once again oddly neglected, stranded on a mediocre early blu-ray with a frustratingly subpar transfer. Such a visually stunning, singular work deserved better. And now Arrow Video has finally come along to do better, giving us a lavish limited edition featuring a brand-new 4K restoration supervised by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski himself.
I have loved this film ever since I first saw the theatrical cut on VHS as a teenager, and I had a poster for it on my wall all through film school, so I am beyond excited by the thought of this definitive 4K special edition leading more people to discover Dark City, and further canonizing it as a classic. So let’s return to Shell Beach with Arrow’s limited edition, and revisit Alex Proyas’s magnum opus 27 years later.
THE FILM:
Note – this review primarily discusses the director’s cut, which is the vastly superior experience of the film, and if you are a newcomer, absolutely the one you should watch first.
In the director’s cut, Dark City opens as a cryptic, complete mystery. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell, in his first starring role and still one of his best) awakens disoriented in a strange hotel room with no memory, only a few clues to his identity, and the mutilated body of a woman. After a mysterious phone call warns him to run, he flees out into the night to unravel the mystery: of who he is, of why he has no memory, and of who committed the murder – assuming it wasn’t him. But something far more strange and sinister is going on. John is being pursued by pale, sinister figures dressed all in black. Whenever the clock strikes midnight the city stops, then warps and twists and changes; its residents changing with it, swapping memories and personalities. And the night never seems to end…
It is a tantalizingly strange and otherworldly mystery-box of a film, with one of the most spellbinding first half-hours I can think of. With minimal dialogue, cryptic and teasing clues doled out very deliberately, and an eerie mood of existential horror and half-asleep disorientation, Dark City casts a powerful spell. The world that John is stumbling through is beautiful and ornate and perfectly crafted, and deliberately very wrong: everything feels conspicuously artificial and unreal, in a way that calls attention to itself. Something is clearly wrong with this place, but everything, except the knowledge that something is wrong, is withheld from us. In crafting this mystery, the artistry of the film is staggeringly confident, and every shot in the film's first half hour feels perfectly controlled.
Again, if you watch the director’s cut. If you watch the theatrical cut, with its absolutely ruinous opening voiceover that spoils every aspect of the mystery before it has even begun, most of the pleasures of this opening half hour are undermined, and the impact is reduced to a movie that looks incredible and is very atmospheric, in which we are watching characters be teased with things we already know. Hence why watching the correct version is important, and why it was such a victory for cinema that Alex Proyas was allowed to release his director’s cut, despite the film’s theatrical failure.
While the rest of the film may not remain quite as perfectly masterful as its first half-hour – there are some clumsy but necessary exposition dumps, and some dodgy late-90s CGI when the film’s ambitious vision exceeds what its practical effects were capable of – it remains a great movie throughout, and a wonderfully unique and imaginative film of the highest order.
And it is so unique despite working with so many very familiar elements. Dark City wears its influences on its sleeve, with Alex Proyas drawing freely from the aesthetics of film noir and German expressionism and Terry Gilliam; from the narrative tropes of noir and pulp detective fiction, from Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre, from The Twilight Zone, from cosmic horror. It doesn’t need to hide any of these influences, because the conspicuously unreal nature of the city is itself a pastiche of different times and places; a place of artifice. It is a place where every character’s existence is a recycled narrative, except for our amnesiac protagonist John who is a non-character, a stranger in the most existential, Albert Camus sense of the word.
Alex Proyas, clearly a student of literature and art and philosophy and early film, distills all of these influences into a blend that is totally unique, inspired, and very intelligent. Despite drawing from many distinct aesthetics, Dark City looks very unique and distinctive. And while it draws so much from archetypal narratives, its story feels original and very satisfying. And it has rich thematic layers beneath the surface. This is a film about the nature of self: about whether we have an innate self at all, whether it comes from our memories and experiences or some more intangible place like the soul, how we can understand ourselves and the world of similarly alienated people around us, and if it’s possible to make sense of ourselves and our existences at all. The villains in the film, appropriately called The Strangers, are existential ones: ones whose threat stems from their alienation from themselves and from humanity, and their inability to understand the human condition, although they long to.
While Proyas’s singularly strange vision, and the world he created with his brilliant design team, are characters in themselves (and have gotten the bulk of the attention in my review so far), the film’s cast has quite the task, needing to sell these high-concept ideas and make them believably human. Fortunately, Proyas has assembled quite the excellent ensemble indeed. For his mysterious blank-slate of a protagonist, Proyas was determined to cast a relatively unknown actor and not a movie star, eventually choosing Rufus Sewell, who at the time was almost exclusively a stage actor. He could not have chosen better: Sewell is fantastic in an extremely tricky role, which should have made him something of a star, had anyone seen this film when it first came out. The supporting cast, however, is stacked. Jennifer Connelly and William Hurt are both as excellent as even, inhabiting archetypal film-noir roles as John’s world-weary nightclub-crooner wife, caught up in the mystery of what has happened to him, and the brilliant, existentially lonely detective on his trail. Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff from Rocky Horror) is fantastically creepy and otherworldly as the primary Stranger villain, putting his distinctive sikly, somehow creepy and offputting voice to excellent use. This movie gives Rocky Horror a run for its money as O’Brien’s most memorable role, which is really saying something. Only Kiefer Sutherland doesn’t work for me, in a too-weird-for-his-own-good performance made up largely of physical and vocal tics and affectations; he is turned all the way up to eleven in a mad-scientist role that feels almost fit for a silent film. It is certainly never dull or interesting though! Aside from his (in my opinion) questionable performance choices though, the whole ensemble is spot-on.
The occasional odd performance choice, bit of bad CGI, or blunt exposition dump aside, Dark City is a truly remarkable film. Dense with fascinating ideas, bold and exciting remixes of archetypal tropes, and some of the most staggeringly great production design you will ever see, this movie is really something special. It is also the kind of film that a filmmaker usually only gets to make once, and usually at great cost to their career. It truly is a carte-blanche movie: after the massive success of The Crow, Alex Proyas had the keys to the kingdom to make any follow-up film he wanted, with as few strings attached as possible, and he used that opportunity to make his deeply strange and singular dream project. Its absolute failure upon release meant that Proyas never got that kind of creative control ever again (after this he was largely stuck directing studio-dictated forgettable blockbusters like I, Robot), but I suspect that he thinks it was worth it, to get to make the kind of unique movie that directors almost never get to make at this level of budget. He definitely got the last laugh in the long run: almost 30 years later, Dark City is a revered cult classic, and this lavish special edition is a tribute to its enduring uniqueness.
THE ARROW VIDEO LIMITED EDITION:
Dark City arrives from Arrow Video in both blu-ray and 4K UHD versions, each in a gorgeous hardbox package, featuring a book of essays, a double-sided poster, a stack of publicity stills, and in a cheeky packaging move, a postcard from Shell Beach and the business card belonging to Kiefer Sutherland’s character, Dr. Schreber, which is handed to a few people throughout the film.
Both cuts of the film come in a brand-new 4k restoration, supervised by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. The movie looks ridiculously good in this new restoration. Especially upgrading from the film’s very mediocre early blu-ray, seeing Dark City look this great is a revelation. Colors and contrast look stunning, clarity is perfect, and while there isn’t a lot of visible grain to Dark City, it doesn’t look like any digital noise reduction has been used; it looks like a nicely filmic transfer. To my eyes, this restoration looks as near to perfect as possible. And since the incredible visuals are a very important part of what is so special about Dark City, seeing it look this great makes all the difference. The audio mix on the disc is outstanding as well, in 2.0, 5.1, and 7.1 options.
When it comes to extras, this limited edition is absolutely stacked, porting over all previous extras from past DVDs and blu-ray, as well as adding a ton of new ones. The coolest new extra is definitely the hour-long retrospective documentary Return to Dark City, which brings back all of the core creative staff behind the film – from Proyas, to the production design and visual effects and costume teams, to Rufus Sewell – to dig into the history of the production. It is a fascinating, very in-depth documentary which dives deep into the craft and artistry of how Dark City was made. If you are a fan of the film, or just a lover of the craft of filmmaking, it is essential viewing.
There are also two very good new visual essays on the film, one of which dives into its relationship with film noir, and the other of which examines the layers of its psychological themes. Then there is a brand-new commentary with Alex Proyas, and another new commentary by the film podcasters at Film Versus Film, both of which are very interesting, although in very different ways. It is a phenomenal bunch of new extras. And then there are several more audio commentaries from the previous theatrical and director’s cut DVDs, including the fascinating classic commentary by Roger Ebert, and a couple vintage behind-the-scenes featurettes. It is a very full two discs of extras, and fans of the film should be more than satisfied.
Arrow Video have knocked it out of the part with this limited edition of Dark City. Between the gorgeous restoration and excellent extras, this set leaves nothing to be desired; it is a definitive release of an outstanding film which has deserved one for far too long. This limited edition is an essential purchase, to which I give the highest recommendation.
- Christopher S. Jordan