The urban hell hole in which Alex Proyas’s Dark City takes place is a passé science-fiction dystopia. As crafted by production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, the setting draws heavily from the sci-fi of the early 20th century. This is an analog world of clockwork gears, bulky gadgets, and wires that reveals a heavy debt to Fritz Lang that only deepens when taken in tandem with the noir costuming.
The film’s atmosphere suggests a stasis reinforced by the manner in which a group of pale beings called the Strangers can freeze and reverse time in order to perform experiments on a city’s denizens. Able to implant and rewrite memories at will, the Strangers give their subjects new identities every day, rebooting them in a world of endless night to see how humans respond to the stimuli of their pasts.
One resident of this grotesque zoo, though, proves resistant to these manipulations. Awakening one night in a bathtub, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) is incapable of remembering anything about himself—until he pieces together the fragments of his most recent memory implants. When the time comes for him to be lulled asleep to reset, Murdoch doesn’t bend, soon discovering that he possesses some of the same psychic abilities of his overseers. Evading pursuit by the Strangers, he also attempts to suss out his fragmented sense of self, retracing his steps to determine which aspects of his memories are real and which are fabrications.
Along the way, Dark City makes numerous open and subtle nods to its inspirations. The Strangers dress in black trench coats and fedoras that render them as a cross between 1940s detectives and Gestapo officers, radiating menace even from a distance. Murdoch discovers that he has a wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), who’s a smoky club torch singer, her hair perfectly coiffed in a Veronica Lake swoop that alluringly shades one of her eyes. Keifer Sutherland plays a mad scientist who helps the Strangers craft their memory implants with a breathy stammer that’s clearly a tribute to the skittish, conniving screen persona of Peter Lorre.
At times, the narrative takes a back seat to luxuriating in such references, but Dark City isn’t mere pastiche. Proyas balances noir, sci-fi, and horror with a deft atmosphere of gloom and dread that hangs oppressively over Murdoch as he barrels toward some kind of escape. If the film’s style is a throwback, its thematic interests of surveillance state paranoia and an imposed sense of social stasis are of a piece with other late-’90s works like The Matrix and The Truman Show. Faced with a reality that may be more terrible than programmed fiction, Murdoch would still rather live free. In that sense, Dark City is ultimately positive, recapitulating noir’s post-WWII social anomie as a quest for self-actualization over complacency.
Image/Sound
Arrow Video’s 4K transfer is simply flawless, maximizing the depth of this darkly lit film while also bringing out the full range of its sickly greens and pulsing alien blues. The ashen faces of the Strangers pop as much as the occasional burst of red, and even the dimmest scene suffers from no crushing artifacts. Fine detail is incredible and grain distribution is evenly distributed.
Even more impressive is the new Atmos soundtrack, which overwhelmingly mixes the sounds of the titular city, from percolating water to grinding metal, with the darkly omnipresent drone of Trevor Jones’s score. A triumph of showy surround activity, track makes a virtue out of calling attention to the canned nature of some of the ambient sound effects.
Extras
Arrow ports over the three audio commentaries from Warner’s 2008 Blu-ray release of Dark City: one by director Alex Proyas, one by screenwriters Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, and one by critic Roger Ebert, whose impassioned championing of the film helped to solidify its cult status. The former two tracks abound in considerable insights and anecdotes about the production, while the latter features one of Ebert’s most analytical works of extended criticism, highlighting the film’s stylistic debts to earlier sci-fi and noir works while also breaking down shot patterns and the subtextual elements of the byzantine production design.
Remarkably, Arrow supplements this trio of commentaries with a pair of new ones: an extremely enthusiastic one by critics Craig Anderson, Bruce Isaacs, and Herschel Isaacs, and one by Proyas that’s notable for his air of retrospection, serving as a fascinating contrast to the indignation he airs on the earlier track over Dark City’s troubled production and re-editing. On the new track, it’s clear that Proyas has made his peace with the things he wasn’t able to accomplish during filming and editing, and he takes evident pride in Dark City’s cult status.
Elsewhere, two making-of documentaries included on the 2008 Blu-ray add up to nearly 80 minutes of informative interviews and ample production footage, while a new hour-long documentary collects a fresh batch of interviews with cast and crew reflecting on the film’s legacy. Arrow also includes two new video essays, one on Dark City’s relationship to noir and another specifically focused on the production design of its urban labyrinth.
Overall
Between the gorgeous 4K transfer, robust new Atmos soundtrack, and bevy of extras old and new, Alex Proyas’s cult sci-fi noir receives its best home video release to date.
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