Dark City (Blu-ray)

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What do you get when you combine film noir, mystery, fantasy, and science fiction? You get "Blade Runner," of course. OK, I mean what else do you get? You get "The Matrix." Let me try again. You get "Dark City." Not that I dislike film noir, mystery, fantasy, or science fiction. I like these genres a lot. And I like "Blade Runner," "The Matrix," and "Dark City" a lot. In fact, I'm pleased as punch with this new, Blu-ray edition of "Dark City" with its longer Director's Cut, improved, high-definition picture, and additional bonus items. It's a good deal all the way around.

I wasn't always so happy with the movie, though. When it first came out in 1998, I thought it was a little too derivative of the aforementioned "Blade Runner" as well as its biggest inspiration, Fritz Lang's classic "Metropolis." I didn't mind "Dark City" paying tribute to the older films; I just thought it had gone too far in imitating them. "Dark City" seemed to me at the time a perfect example of style over substance. Today, I still think the movie is mostly style, but it's a style so engrossing, it more than makes up for any lack of substance.

The fact is, the filmmakers mean for the viewer to look closely at everything in the movie, and they mean to remind the viewer of other things in film history. Its dark, curiously futuristic city of the past evokes images of the noir settings of the 40s and 50s in general and Lang's "Metropolis" from 1927 in particular; but I'd bet the movie conjures up even more-recent memories for a majority of its younger viewers. "Dark City" looks like bits and pieces of "Blade Runner," "Batman," "Hellraiser," "Phantasm," "Brazil," and director Alex Proyas's own previous film, "The Crow," with the added glumness of "Dune" thrown in for good measure.

There is no doubt that "Dark City" is as entertainingly bizarre a film as you'll find, a story that finds a strange, psychological surrealism in a nightmarish world of perpetual night. It's grim, fascinating, always absorbing, wildly imaginative, and not a little scary.

The story revolves around John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes up one night lying naked in a strange bathtub in a strange room in a strange apartment in a strange city. An unknown man phones to tell him that somebody has erased his memory. He discovers the body of a murdered woman nearby. Then, to add insult to injury, he finds a group of dark, frightening figures chasing after him.

From here, the plot of "Dark City" follows two threads: Murdoch searches the city trying to figure out who he is, while a police detective, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), searches the city for a serial killer, with Murdoch his most likely suspect.

I suppose one could argue that like a lot of somber-toned video games, the snoop-and-shoot action of "Dark City" is fun for a while but becomes wearisome with repetition for anyone but a devotee. That's the way I felt the first time I saw the movie. Fortunately, I've come to view it differently over time, discovering new and varied depths in its story and characters I never noticed before. How could it be otherwise when "Dark City" offers a ton of special effects, singular events, and peculiar characters. Kiefer Sutherland, for instance, does a wonderful Peter Lorre mad-scientist turn as Dr. Daniel Schreber, a fellow who claims to know all about Murdoch and his predicament. Jennifer Connelly is a beautiful, unwitting, 1940s' style, nightclub singer femme fatale, who claims to be Murdoch's wife. And Ian Richardson plays a menacingly sinister figure lurking in a shadowy underground of heaven-knows-what portent. Great, spooky stuff.

Psychologists are fond of saying that people create and order their own universe. Certainly, "Dark City" creates such a universe for itself and its characters. It explores the questions of what is illusion, what is reality, and what is the substance and meaning of the soul. The story poses some intriguing "what if" premises; the alleyways, the shadows, the camera angles, and the lighting all bespeak of vintage film noir; and the landscape would make H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe proud.

My only minor quibble about "Dark City" is that it winds up spelling out too much. Better to have left some things unexplained and let imagination do the rest. But that's OK. The trip is well worth the travel time.

Video:
New Line's video engineers have plainly done a bit of restoration work in this BD50, VC-1, 1080p, 2.35:1 ratio, Blu-ray transfer. The movie is dark, to be sure, but its colors (what there are beyond black, white, gray, and brown) now stand out more clearly and more vibrantly than in the studio's earliest SD edition; and, of course, the definition is sharper.

However, while I never noticed much graininess in the older standard-def version (which may have been a characteristic of the original print), there is hardly any grain at all in this new, ultraclean BD transfer. It looks as if New Line may have applied a further touch of filtering to the image as well as a little edge enhancement, because if you look closely you'll see some very small haloing around selected objects, especially those noticeable against light, bright backgrounds. At a normal viewing distance, the EE is not objectionable because it's hardly visible, but the picture's soft appearance does tend to make many of the characters' facial features appear almost unnaturally smooth--not quite as detailed or revealing as one would like them to be.