July is the third installment in what I like to call Awesome 90's Trilogy. While May consist of the true Action/Adventure (The Mask of Zorro) movie we've been missing deeply, June was the f**ked up but funny film that was ahead of its time (The Truman Show), July is the monthly recommendation where it blends film noir and phycological thriller aka Dark City, a movie that tells honestly to your face that your life was a lie and trippy aliens are your puppet masters who play with your strings all day long. People sometimes compare this Sci-Fi classic to The Matrix for which now re-watching this movie I don't really see the resemblance other than robots taking over the world and Aliens somehow taking a hand full of humans and using them as puppets but will have to leave that for another discussion. Anyway, this is another one of these films that continues my huge crush on Jennifer Connelly who if you weren't a 90's kid, that woman was the Rita Hayworth of beautiful women in the 90's. So, let's all sleep now and explore the twisted world of Dark City.
John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he was wanted for a series of brutal murders. The problem is that he can't remember whether he committed the murders or not. For one moment, he is convinced that he's gone completely mad. Murdoch seeks to unravel the twisted riddle of his identity. As he edges closer to solving the mystery, he stumbles upon a fiendish underworld controlled by a group of ominous beings collectively known as the Strangers.
A lot of people always compare this film to The Matrix, for which I beg to differ mainly because The Matrix is mostly like a cyberpunk science fiction film where they're telling us how corporations are running are natural way of life, and the Agents or the robots are trying to keep everything in order of things. Dark City, I look at this great film as a look of the human mind, and what happens when you wake up to the horror that you’re a guinea pig for an alien experiment. And to be truthfully honest, Dark City has one of the best storylines than it does with the Matrix, for many reasons it starts off in the best way possible, the protagonist wakes up with no memory of what happened and is chased by a group of telekinetic race of Aliens who use this mysterious world as a way to experiment on humans and Rufus Sewell's character is trying to clear his name from a murder he knows is not true while understanding what world he's been living in. Now, how they came to kidnap the humans how they came in existence who knows, all you need to know is that it’s a film that has a simple concept that goes from point A to point B and Point C by the end of the frame. Moreover, the entire film explains itself all within 1 hour and 51 minutes for which really that's the perfect length of a movie you need to have in your movie furthermore if you can make statistics and what makes a perfect Science fiction film Star Wars and Dark City are among those categories. The other thing on what makes this film amazing is that it also incorporates a film noir feel to the film where there's is a hero in the film but the shadowy figures are these stranger like aliens that have a way of screwing with the humans mind though is also set in a dark like New York City that feels like it’s in the 1940's decade to it, and really all of the credit goes to writer/director Alex Proyas, who made it clear in an article talking about the concept of the film "One of the things that we're exploring in this film, is what it is that makes us who we are. And, when you strip an individual of his identity, is there some spark, some essence there that keeps them being human, gives them some sort of identity?" Even Proyas referenced film noirs from the 1940's and 1950's as an influence for the film, also adding science fiction along for the ride as well as to have an element of horror to unsettle the audience, for which I view as smart thinking on his part. The best way to describe Rufus Sewell's career is my first film I was introduced to him was Bless the Child where he played a villain in that movie and A Knight's Tale, we he as well played a bad guy also and let’s not forget the Illusionist basically a cheap imitation to the Prestige. So, in all fairness the first three films I've seen Sewell in were basically antagonist roles this is one of the few films I've actually seen him in where he plays a good guy, and he does a great job playing a man whose both confused and scared at the same time but is also in observer when he begins to understand where he is and is trying to search for answers as to what really happened to his life. In all honesty I don't know how many times I can talk about my crush on Jennifer Connelly because in all honesty, I'll give you at least two to three movies and that's basically shows off her Rita Hayworth side, and that's Dark City, The Rocketeer and for fun I'm going to throw in Top Gun: Maverick, but with this film she does such a great job using her looks to mesmerize the audience especially when she's first introduced singing Sway and she just knocks it out of the park but also doing a splendid job of playing the worried wife because as we all know you have to have that love connection with the protagonist and the lead female and both Rufus Sewell do a great job in this movie. I've always remembered Kiefer Sutherland always playing like the sort of tough guy in certain movies like I don't know maybe The Three Musketeers, add A Few Good Men and let's not forget his most notable TV role in 24, but with this movie he plays a man whose one both sides of the coin and is somewhat disabled but also explains to the protagonist and the audience of what is going on, though sure I do believe he was an excellent bad guy in Phone Booth, but he also does a great job playing the deranged mad scientist who is a guide of Dark City. I also should add one actor in the film, and that's the main antagonist aka Mr. Hand aka one of the Strangers that experiments on the humans, and that's actor Richard O'Brien who’s excellent of playing this creepy looking unknown alien, but what really makes him great to watch is that he really didn't need anything he just needed that fedora duster. But it's really in part of Alex Proyas who based the Strangers on Richard O'Brien himself when he first saw him on the Rocky Horror Picture Show, also quoted saying "I had Richard in mind physically when I wrote the character, because I had these strange, bald-looking men with an ethereal, androgynous quality". And when Proyas visited London to cast for the movie he met O'Brien and found him suitable for the role, so yeah talk about fate reaching out to an extended hand. Out of all the monthly movies I recommend this is one of those films that's a long-lost masterpiece and it truly needs to be seen furthermore to be appreciated again, so if you have the time to pick a movie to watch on a local movie night. Then I would highly recommend watching Dark City.
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