Cinematical

All the world's a stage in Dark City, and all the city-dwellers are acting out roles, one show nightly. At midnight sharp, jury-rigged biological clocks cause a jolt of narcolepsy throughout the city. People standing in line for a movie drop like stones. Cars on the highway slow and stall as faces mash down onto steering wheels. A bustling office becomes an echo chamber. When all is quiet, in come The Strangers, a race of macrobiotic Uncle Festers in tulip-shaped cloaks who stand upright as they float through the night air, attending to each little corner of a nightmarish experiment of unknown purpose. The unwitting sleepers are dragged away and posed in new beds and chairs, with new wallets placed on countertops and new clothes hanging in the closet. The curtain goes up again.

The cityscape dreamed up and created by director Alex Proyas and his team for Dark City is unique in every way. It exists in the quick of a deep cut in time's fabric, where human identities are shuffled like playing cards and a sixth sense for improvisation is necessary for survival. It's a city of strangers, with inhabitants who seem to have immigrated from different historical eras. A soft-spoken detective in a fedora has shown up 60 years late for work, while a jumpy, unpredictable doctor was lifted straight out of some Nazi laboratory. One of the joys of the film is that we get to live in this world for a while, on its own terms, before the need for an explanation arises. When it does, it's not quite as sinister as you might expect.

The Strangers are scientists of a sort, on a quest to learn: they mix and match the memories of their abducted human subjects every night, to test whether a personality or "soul" has any attachment to the body that will remain once the brain chemistry has been swapped. "Will a man given the history of a killer continue in that vein?" Some of the 'actors' embrace their new roles, while others appear to suffer psychological tissue-rejection. Thoroughly modern Jennifer Connelly (still sporting some baby fat) looks embarrassed and noncommittal as she wears a 50s dress and sings a torch song. Another girl, a 'gee, mista' floozy from the era of Judy Holliday, is so strikingly beautiful that we don't believe it for a second when she reveals herself as a street hooker - The Strangers are guilty of bad casting in this instance.

One of the subjects, John Murdoch, (Rufus Sewell) awakens during a staging just before he is to be implanted with the new identity of a serial killer. He escapes the scene and is soon fleeing Detective Bumstead, (William Hurt) who ignores the broken windows in his own mind by focusing hard and heavy on whoever he is pursuing. In the present shuffle of the deck, Murdoch is supposed to be married to someone named Emma (Jennifer Connelly) but he doesn't even know her. As for Emma, her mind is so scrambled with imagery that when she goes to visit her husband's psychiatrist, she finds him in a full-on mad scientist lab, complete with rats in a giant maze, and it doesn't phase her at all. Like the rest of Dark City's citizens, she's used to a casserole of cross-eyed, counter-intuitive imagery. (Bathhouses and automats are even in fashion)

Of all the jarring visuals, the most jarring arrives in the form of one of The Strangers - a small child. He may be pint-sized, but he's still one of them, running with the pack and offering the same putrid snarl as he wafts around dark corners. Also like the elders, he eschews his God-like powers in favor a shiny blade when he's hunting down rogue citizens like John Murdoch who have awakened inconveniently during the staging ritual. At one point, we even see the little devil murdering the gorgeous prostitute, as part of a staging. (Can someone tell me why that actress isn't a box office juggernaut today? She puts nine out of ten movie stars to shame with pure good looks.)

The only worthy complaint I can muster about the film involves the ending, which reverts to a trippy version of the classic, brainless Hollywood shoot-out. (The Strangers are able to emit a seismic smoke-ring of ectoplasm from their foreheads, which leads to enormous property damage) For a film that so deftly explores ideas of authenticity, the final confrontation is the only part of the film that feels fake. If there's a budget for big, operatic special effects, then so be it, but is that really a constraint on the imagination? There should have been a climax that rose to the standards of the rest of the film. The denouement makes up for it, though; I won't ruin it, but on a second pass it doesn't seem quite as a happy and benign as we're led to believe. Is Dark City in better hands? Does the city's future still exist on a whim?

The science-fiction genre has been engaged in a loveless affair with the action-adventure genre for a long time now, and as a result, many avenues of science-fiction have been neglected, one of them being the implications of sleep: how it makes us vulnerable to our enemies, wreaks havoc on the daily stenography of our lives and punctures the idea that life is perpetual and uninterrupted, instead of episodic. It's questions like these, and many more, that Dark City raises. If our lives are really divided into chapters, could we be someone different each day? Could we leave the past behind as easily as a suit of clothes? What kind of world would that imply?