Remembering a Forgotten Classic

Matt Damore

Science Fiction might be my favorite genre of film. In particular, I want to focus on a movie that came out in 1998 called Dark City. The film stars Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist, A Knight’s Tale) as John Murdoch, who has lost his memory. It’s not too long before Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) calls Murdoch to warn him about a mysterious group of people (called The Strangers) who are on his trail!

The Strangers have the mystifying power of psychokinesis, the power to move things with the mind. Come to find out, Murdoch also has this power. The story is about Murdoch finding out who he is, who The Strangers are, and trying to remember whether he really murdered people, which is the reason why a relentless detective (William Hurt) is hounding him.

The city at night is freakish, as all its citizens fall into a coma, and the entire cityscape transforms, and the identities of everyone are altered. We later come to discover that The Strangers are extraterrestrials on the verge of extinction, bound together by a collective consciousness, who use corpses as parasites in order to soak up their memories: find out how humans survive so they themselves can. But Murdoch poses a threat to The Strangers’ plan, since he is also endowed with their powers.

While everyone was comatose, Murdoch awoke, and being the anomaly he now is, The Strangers implant one of their own with Murdoch’s memories to find him! The adventure leads to the edge of the city at a billboard which we find is a portal to outer space, the portal The Strangers used to enter the city.

But then the real surprise comes. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know. Through the portal, we come to find that the city (Dark City) isn’t on earth at all; it is a floating environment in itself, protected by a force field. Later, Murdoch is held hostage by The Strangers underneath the city to inject into him their collective consciousness, believing Murdoch to be the last piece to their puzzle ending their experiments. Dr. Schreber, however, and against the wishes of The Strangers, injects Murdoch with the false memories necessary to inform him of his entire life, which enables him to tune his psychokinesis to a point. He defeats The Strangers, and uses his powers to make a landscape which is a copy of Shell Beach, his home town, after learning his wife has been hopelessly assimilated into The Strangers’ collective consciousness.

Murdoch finally reveals why The Strangers' experiments in learning the humans’ adapting abilities have failed: they had been searching in the wrong place - the mind. They ought to have been searching the human heart. In the new Shell Beach, a copy of his wife is there waiting for him, with new memories, and with a new name (Anna, rather than Emma), and they begin their relationship again.

What a movie! It’s amazing. I highly recommend it, especially after you find out it was influenced by German Expressionism, a movement dabbling in the Fantastic. It is quite an achievement to create a city organized and created by various memories, a cityscape which literally morphs in response to the psyche.