The Perfect 90s Sci-Fi Thriller Unfairly Overwritten By The Matrix

By Robert Scucci
| Published 49 seconds ago

Waking up with amnesia in an unfamiliar place is never a fun way to start your day, especially if there are alien forces calling the shots behind the scenes. During my party days, I had my share of lost weekends in the name of pure, unbridled, misguided fun, but 1998’s Dark City is not a depiction of one of those adventures.

Instead, we meet a man who wakes up in a motel and immediately finds out he’s the primary suspect in a string of ritualistic murders. He suddenly has abilities he doesn’t understand, and he begins to suspect that the city he’s living in isn’t what it appears to be.

As Dark City pushes through its premise and into increasingly surreal, nightmarish territory, it never loses its grounding. Thanks to Alex Proyas’ ambitious direction with the help of Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography, the film bends time, space, genres, and massive setpieces in ways that feel reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman films without ever coming off like a carbon copy.

What’s My Name Again?

Dark City introduces us to John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who doesn’t remember he’s John Murdoch. After waking up in a bathtub in a seedy hotel room with no memory of how he got there, he receives a strange call from Dr. Daniel P. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a psychiatrist who provides a bare bones briefing. John is accused of murder.

Police Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is hunting him. His wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), hasn’t seen him in over three weeks and has no idea where he disappeared to. With only a breadcrumb trail of clues to guide him, John has his work cut out for him in reclaiming his identity and figuring out what the heck is going on.

John repeatedly crosses paths with a group of pale, bald-headed men in trench coats known as the Strangers. He believes they experimented on him, which resulted in his amnesia.

Daniel, who clearly knows more than he lets on, suggests the Strangers are alien visitors running experiments on humans, rewriting memories, and shaping behavior. John appears to possess a rare ability that lets him alter reality through telekinesis and matter manipulation, a process referred to as “tuning.” Haunted by vague memories of a place called Shell Beach, he becomes convinced he must reach it to understand the bigger picture. Therein lies the problem: everyone knows of Shell Beach, but nobody knows how to get there.

A Grand Plan That Leaves Its Subjects Clueless

The Strangers’ experiments leave everyone in the dark in Dark City, because their plan involves altering human memories through experimental injections. Even John Murdoch, who has a gift no other human possesses, isn’t convinced he’s always been John Murdoch. He can’t shake the fear that he might be living inside someone else’s borrowed consciousness.

Leaning hard into its neo noir aesthetic, Dark City becomes a full sensory assault as buildings reshape themselves before your eyes and entire environments glitch into existence. The city within the city contains endless permutations of reality, and the ghoulish and menacing Strangers are pulling all the strings. Inspector Frank Bumstead, fedora on and patience gone, has zero time for anyone’s nonsense as more pieces of the conspiracy click into place.

One world bleeds into the next, and no one can trust their fragmented memories because there is no measurable sense of how long any of them have lived under these conditions. John’s awareness is both blessing and curse because he can see the other side for what it is, but he can’t quite articulate it to people who lack the context to understand what he’s experiencing.

A one-of-a-kind visual experience that looks just as impressive today as it did in 1998, Dark City is perfect for anyone who likes their sci-fi cerebral but still grounded in crime thriller beats. For every feverish, reality-bending encounter you might run into, there is still some good old-fashioned police work happening under the radar that keeps you tethered, even as the rest of the fiction begins to unravel.

Dark City is streaming for free on Tubi.