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John Murdoch has a problem. He just woke up in an old, decrepit hotel suite—the sort where the shadows seem painted on the walls—to find blood on his forehead and a murdered prostitute beside his bed. The police are on their way, and a mysterious group of bald men, raspy-voiced and pale as ghosts, are after him too. Even worse, Murdoch has no memories; he only knows his name from the ID in his wallet. He might, indeed, be guilty of this murder. Then again, he might not.
So begins Dark City, the latest gothic fantasy from former music-video director Alex Proyas. His last film, The Crow, was a bloodthirsty comic-book adaptation in which a man returned from the dead to get revenge for the murder of himself and his fiancee. The Crow looked good, but it didn't have much to say. With Dark City, based on a story he wrote, Proyas ups the style quotient and shoots for something more significant, plugging into current debates on the nature of the mind and soul. Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) discovers that the bald men are members of a race of aliens known as the Strangers, who have mastered the ability to control, create, and reshape the physical world through the power of their minds. But this power offers them little satisfaction because they have, so we are told, no individuality, no freedom, and no hope of eternal life. They have gained the world, you might say, but they have no soul to lose.
And so they have abducted a number of human beings and planted them in an artificial world, which the Strangers revise at will on a daily basis. (Thanks to the richly detailed art direction and a relentless soundtrack that bathes each and every second in various forms of music—orchestral, ambient, even a bit of jazz—the film itself looks and sounds completely artificial, but appropriately so.) The Strangers tinker not simply with the environment in which these humans live but with their very identities, thanks to the assistance of Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a fidgety human accomplice who creates new memories for these human guinea pigs in his test tubes and syringes. His goal: to see what is unique about each human, to see what survives when nature and nurture are changed, to see if there is anything about the human soul that cannot be reduced to physical components. If such a thing exists, the Strangers hope to hijack it, planting their memories within it, to ensure their own survival.
Murdoch is a guinea pig who wakes up, having somehow acquired the same ability to control the physical world that the Strangers have. He unconsciously resists Schreber's attempt to recreate his past and ends up having none at all. Thus begins his quest to find himself—a quest that brings him into contact with Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt), a taciturn detective trying to solve this and other related murders, and Emma (Jennifer Connelly), a woman who remembers—for now, at least—being Murdoch's wife.
While Dark City draws on a wide range of influences, it is particularly reminiscent of the work of Philip K. Dick, a science fiction writer who believed that history—not the mere recording and interpretation of history but the actual historical events themselves—is constantly undergoing retroactive changes. Dick, whose stories inspired the similarly identity-challenged films Blade Runner and Total Recall, sympathized with the Gnostics, who believed that we are all spirits trapped by an evil, soulless, would-be deity, known as the demiurge, within a physical universe.
For Dick, change was a good thing: he proposed that God was slowly transforming this world from the illusions created by the demiurge into "something real." Human beings could break free of this artificial reality—they could free their spirits and prevent themselves from turning into "DNA robots"—by acting spontaneously. Dick's thesis seems to be what is being tested in Dark City. With no memories and new powers, perhaps Murdoch can authenticate himself through his spontaneous reactions to the events around him. But is spontaneity truly possible in a world where psychology and biology are increasingly painting a portrait of the human being that leaves no room for such acts of free will?
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