The movie Dark City imagines a spooky nocturnal world existing beneath the one we know.
by Rich Watson
This post is part of The Secret Places and Trippy Houses Blogathon, a blog event devoted to “the movies and TV shows over the years that have used secret places in their plots.” At the end, I’ll tell you where to find more posts like these.
Music video director Alex Proyas followed his 1994 movie The Crow with another moody, atmospheric film which treaded the more sinister territories of fantasy and sci-fi, in 1998. Dark City was not as big a hit, but time has treated it well.
It’s about beings who experiment on humans in a hidden underworld.
In our secret world
In high school, my girlfriend and I had a hideout of our own: a kind of promontory in Fort Tryon Park. The park has hiking paths and clearings for baseball, soccer and other activities, but it’s mostly wild, uncultivated territory, in an elevated part of upper Manhattan that takes some effort to reach its scenic parts.
Whenever we wanted to get away from it all, we’d go there and sit in this small clearing overlooking the Hudson River. Think of it as a “Lover’s Lane” kind of place, only we didn’t need cars to get there, just the A train.
The spot was away from any paths and well protected by the trees, so we really thought of it as ours, someplace where no one could reach us.
When I think of secret places in film, there’s Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, Yoda’s hideout planet of Dagobah, or Zion from The Matrix movies, but also Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, which has been adapted for the movies more than once. Hideouts in fiction can be romantic or introspective or morbid.
The one in Dark City definitely qualifies as morbid.
Planners of the dark city
In the movie, amnesiac murder suspect Rufus Sewell notices things about himself and the city around him. Why are those strangers putting everyone to sleep at midnight? Why does the city’s architecture keep changing? And how did he acquire the power to alter reality?
The answers lie with the strangers, who are aliens (naturally). They operate out of a hidden lair beneath the city resembling HR Giger’s version of Metropolis. They secretly experiment on humans hoping to discover clues to their survival as a species, but the truth behind the dark city—literally; it’s always night—and of Sewell’s emerging powers, is more surprising. Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt and Kiefer Sutherland co-star.
The film was based on a story by Proyas. The Crow had a similar visual aesthetic: perpetual nighttime, characters in black leather, gloomy cityscape. Unlike director Tim Burton, whose films revel in their macabre nature and are more playful, Proyas takes a somber approach.
Dark City also has a retro style reminiscent of the forties and film noir. For instance, when we first see Connelly, she’s singing in a nightclub wearing an evening gown, as if she was Rita Hayworth. Sutherland’s character clearly evokes Peter Lorre, accent and all.
In a 2002 interview, Proyas shows his appreciation for older movies:
Movies more and more have become about one character because that one character is a movie star who insists that it be about them. Whereas I always loved older movies, particularly film noir of the ‘40s and ‘50s, they always jumped around. There was always the one guy that you knew it was mainly about him, but you knew a lot more about the other characters, about their motivations. They weren’t just sketches. They had some depth to them.
Proyas wrote the screenplay with Lem Dobbs and another filmmaker familiar with dark or supernatural characters, David S. Goyer. He developed either the stories or screenplays for the Blade trilogy and the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, plus he wrote the Crow sequel, City of Angels. On the DVD commentary for Dark City, Goyer theorizes the inhabitants of the city are dead and the city is Purgatory.
Creating the dark city, above and below
Fifty sets were built at Fox Film Studios in Sydney on a $30-40 million budget, creating a German Expressionist-like cityscape. Proyas wanted a distinct contrast between the streamlined human world and the “decrepit, Gothic high-tech” hidden one.
The production designer for Dark City was Patrick Tatopoulos. After this, he went on to do creature design for the Underworld movies and production design for the Sleeping Beauty movie Maleficent.
Tatopoulos and Proyas spent two years prior to the start of production crafting the underworld’s look. Tatopoulos said, “there’s a desperation in the Strangers’ work because their world is crumbling and in decay—that’s what the design reflects.”
He needed three months to build the underworld, fifty feet high. To make it look metallic and decayed, he and his staff cut and shaped canvas and clad it in sheets of polystyrene, textured it to make it appear solid and mixed it with copper. Proyas made the rail car track in the lair look vast thanks to camera trickery and replaceable elements.
Sewell said when he first saw the underworld sketches,
I was more excited than I had been when I read the script…the Underworld was truly remarkable—a little bit scary, very thrilling, and full of hundreds of bald people!
Did The Matrix rip it off?
A year later, the Wachowski siblings made The Matrix, which became a much bigger hit. People have noticed the similarities between the two in terms of look and story beats.
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More posts in The Secret Houses and Trippy Places Blogathon can be found at Taking Up Room, from October 24-26.
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