Let’s go back to the days of ‘The Matrix’ when the newfangled CGI toolbox was employed to visualize virtual Sci-fi fantasy dystopias, the kind that operate by the rules of an all-powerful writer … we can almost hear the ghost of Philip K. Dick rattling its chains, just off-camera. Alex Proyas’ enclosed virtual domain may corral 10 ideas too many, but several are very nicely rendered. It suffers from exposition overload, and it may be too art-directed for its own good, yet we really enjoy a lot of what we see. Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly and Richard O’Brien star; this new 4K disc has both the theatrical and director’s cuts.

Dark City 4K
4K Ultra HD
Arrow Video
1998 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 111 + 100 min. / Street Date June 24, 2025 / Available from Arrow Video / 59.99
Starring: Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O’Brien, Ian Richardson, Bruce Spence, Melissa George.
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Production Designers: George Liddle, Patrick Tatopoulos
Art Directors: Richard Hobbs, Michelle McGahey
Costume Design: Liz Keogh Palmer
Film Editor: Dob Hoenig
Original Music: Trevor Jones
Screenplay by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, David S. Goyer
Executive Producers Michael De Luca, Brian Witten
Produced by Andrew Mason, Alex Proyas
Directed by Alex Proyas

If you build your own imaginary world, how soon will real people move in?  (Sorry, was that a description of Bitcoin?)  Potential filmmakers reared on  Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck must have thought, ‘oooh, what if I could make a whole fake world?’  Sci-fi writers love to re-imagine reality using their own made-up rules, but filming such fantasies was usually cost-prohibitive. Then came Computer Generated Imagery, which can allow a director to make arbitrary changes EASY. Just shoot off a text to the poor artist hired for visual effects:

“Please double the size of the crowd storming the
citadel. And can you give them all funny hats?”
Several projects of this kind were green-lit in the years around the millennium. Alex Proyas’ ambitious thriller Dark City was overlooked in the stampede to praise the next year’s The Matrix, a somewhat similar story of a Sci-Fi universe existing as an alternate reality. Such things weren’t unusual in literary science fiction, but there are a few pioneering precedents. Most prominent is one screwy gem from the ’70s, a German TV miniseries by Rainer Werner Fassbinder called  World on a Wire. It looks like it was made with a minimum of resources, but the ideas are all there, combined with the regulation paranoid thriller elements.

 

For its theatrical release in 1998, director Proyas was entreated to shorten Dark City by more than a reel. A voiceover was added to the opening, to ‘pre-explain’ the story’s complex setup. Those cuts and changes went away when Proyas released his Director’s Cut on disc a few years later. The twisted narrative is still a Frankenstein assemblage of parts of older movies. A 2008 New Line Blu-ray presented both versions, and Arrow has done the same for their new 4K disc set.

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens one day without a memory. He learns that detective Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is hunting him for a murder he doesn’t think he committed. John is told that his beautiful wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) sings in a nightclub. A mysterious Doctor Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) promises to solve John’s problems by giving him an injection from a weird-looking syringe. But John can tell that some very basic things are wrong, starting with the fact that it always seems to be night in this strange city. People talk about their memories of a sunny place called Shell Beach, but nobody knows how to get there.

 

Even weirder is the fact that John shares advanced mental powers with ‘The Strangers,’ sinister pale men in dark coats and hats — who are trying to kill him. The Strangers normally emerge only at the stroke of midnight, when the anonymous citizens of this dark city all fall asleep, as if on cue … so that the city and selected inhabitants can be ‘tuned.’

Alfred Hitchcock said that some filmmakers are complicators and others are simplifiers. Alex Proyas is a complicator and his show is one of the first Sci-Fi spectaculars to make liberal use of Hollywood’s then- new CGI effects. Like a Sim City game gone mad, the city shuts down every night at midnight. Acting as weird overseers, The Strangers then use their mental powers to ‘tune’ the city with adjustments. They move buildings and ‘grow’ new ones. Selected citizens are given new identities and living situations. Hitchcock might have criticized Proyas’ filmic clutter, but we think he’d be intrigued by the film’s paranoid vision of a reality being constantly tweaked by humorless super-beings. This city of eternal night is like a writer’s sketch pad, constantly being re-thought and revised.

 

The filmic clutter of Dark City is its mass of ideas adapted from previous Sci-fi films and literature. The basic amnesia story is a standard launch point for scores of films noir, such as Joe Mankiewicz’s old  Somewhere in the Night. The overall visual aspects of Dark City owe a heavy debt to Fritz Lang’s  Metropolis.

Readers of Philip K. Dick (especially his mind-warping 1969 book  Ubik) will find familiar ground in this virtual world,  that can be altered by the thoughts of the super-minds that maintain it. Proyas’ visual scheme compresses expressionist clocks, nocturnal Noir cityscapes and David Lynchian nightclubs into a stew that may at times seem too familiar, after the high concept Create-A-World tales  The Truman Show and  Pleasantville.

 

Dark City sometimes feels a bit thick for art direction. Alex Proyas was quoted as wanting something fairly realistic, but his designers have run wild with expressionist imagery — uninterrupted film-noirish spaces washed down with splashes of color. We soak up a constant flow of detail. A goldfish swims in a bathtub, seen from an underwater POV. We get an eccentric angle of a policeman tying his shoelaces. Ubik- like clues abound, such as a personal diary that only has blank pages: The Strangers must have thought it would not be opened. The margins of this dark city are like the backstage areas of a Disneyland theme park, a jumble of random spaces behind the fake facades of Main Street.

 

Some reviewers have said that Brandon Lee would have starred in Dark City  if he hadn’t accidentally died on the set of Proyas’ The Crow. Actor Rufus Sewell makes a solid noir protagonist. His Murdoch broods but doesn’t collapse into despair. He doesn’t realize that he shares the ‘superpowers’ of the city’s sinister custodians, The Strangers. Ian Richardson (Brazil), Richard O’Brien (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and Bruce Spence (The Road Warrior) are the most prominent Strangers, who go by odd names like Mr. Hand, Mr. Book and Mr. Wall. They creep about in floor-length leather coats, like Max Shreck’s Nosferatu.  ^*

Talk about borrowed ideas (spoilers): more exposition speeches reveal that The Strangers are aliens envious of our humans souls, just like the Overlords of Arthur C. Clarke’s  Childhood’s End. They look human because they’ve commandeered the bodies of our dead, the operating principle of the lowly Sci-fi turnips  Invisible Invaders and  Plan 9 from Outer Space.

 

It isn’t just John Murdoch who wants to solve the puzzle of the dark city. Star William Hurt is the show’s borrowed film noir detective, who intuits that John Murdoch is innocent of murder. Jennifer Connelly is used for conventional decoration. Her marriage to Murdoch might be an illusion, but we can guess that they’ll be a couple by the fade-out.

We first see Kiefer Sutherland’s Dr. Schreber scuttling about and checking his pocket watch, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.  He is yet another eccentric character, and a difficult fit within the framework of the fantasy. Schreber serves The Strangers by implanting false memories into the brains of selected humans. He’s quick on the trigger with a syringe that pierces human skulls … although the cinematic hypodermic champ is still sexy Fiona Lewis, from Michael Laughlin’s 1981  Dead Kids. Ms. Lewis very convincingly needles teenage victims right in the corner of the eye.

Making the dramatics function in this blend of film noir and fantasy themes can’t have been easy. Rufus Sewell finds a good groove of determined confusion for Murdoch, while William Hurt hones his detective to perfection, projecting an air of intelligent calm. The surprise is Richard O’Brien’s Mr. Hand. Surrounded by dozens of comrade Strangers that behave like a zombie lynch mob, O’Brien plays his alien with a curious depth. Even in the bizarre costume, he remains in control, giving Mr. Hand a personality that’s almost sympathetic.

Computer Generated Imagery was just finding its feet in 1998, and director Proyas makes excellent use of its possibilities. We assume that New Line constructed many big sets in its Australian studios, but one has to refer to BTS video footage to see what was in front of the camera and what was later added digitally. Some of the visual effects on the Director’s cut are not from 1998 — Proyas had many of them recomposited when he got the go-ahead to reconstruct his longer personal version. Looking different is the distortion that occurs when John uses his mental stare to move objects and strike people down.

 

This dark city looks fairly normal until we see magic doors appear at will, and everyone goes to sleep at the stroke of midnight. The city is both fake and real, which makes it a tough assignment for Alex Proyas’ designers. In the effort to attain a ‘not quite right’ artificial quality, the streets have a tendency to look too much like overdone movie sets. The clock that stops time every night may have reminded 1998 moviegoers of the exaggerated clock in the Coen brothers’ highly stylized comedy  The Hudsucker Proxy.

The Director’s cut adds two or three scenes that slow the pace just enough to allow Dark City to breathe a bit. Some of the changes improve the tone considerably. When Jennifer Connelly sings The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in the cabaret, we now hear the actress’s own voice, which connects much better with the audience. It convinces us that she’s a real human too, not an alien clone.

 

Alex Proyas’ overall concept eventually distills down to the not-so-deep message that ‘reality is what we make it.’  Well, if you have super-powers that can alter reality, maybe. Our final impression is of a nicely tuned sampling of classic Sci-fi themes. The true form of The Strangers is revealed as a spindly, transparent spider-thing operating like Robert Heinlein’s  Puppet Masters. The real humans being used as experimental subjects have been reprogrammed with fake memories, like P.K. Dick characters in  Blade Runner and  Total Recall. And John Murdoch conveniently finds that he’s acquired new super-powers, like one of David Cronenberg’s  Scanners. The Murdoch-aliens conflict is resolved in a Scanners- like ‘battle of the telepaths’ showdown.

That may just be too many hand-me-down ideas, a situation shared by Richard Kelly’s equally eclectic  Southland Tales. Dark City may not be a pinnacle of Sci-fi filmmaking, but neither is it hollow eye candy propped up with explosions and slo-mo gunfights. Proyas doesn’t bore us with lazy nihilism, the first refuge of dystopians with nothing to say. His finale tries for a slightly whimsical irony, emulating the finish of the old Film Blanc  Here Comes Mr. Jordan. It’s not hard to swallow — we like Rufus Sewell and Jennifer Connelly.

 

 

Arrow Video’s 4K Ultra HD of Dark City is a new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negatives of both the Director’s Cut and the 1998 Theatrical Cut. This package is a 4K-only presentation. To see the movie on Blu-ray, one needs to seek out a parallel edition.

The film’s images are even more optimized in this 4K remaster — Proyas’ sinister city has the colorful appearance of a Disneyland of Film Noir. Every shot is digitally ‘optimized.’ Cobbled streets below give way to Metropolis– like skyscrapers above, with stylish tilted pedestrian bridges. All that’s missing are airplanes and big neon signs. Proyas filmed in Super 35, which uses sharper prime (non-anamorphic) lenses. The show is a good workout for one’s 4K setup, picture and sound.

Disc producers Neil Snowdon and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas curated the enormous list of video extras, cited below. Quite a few items are new, including new commentaries; enough time has passed for the contributors to do more than just praise their own work. There’s obviously more than enough here for fans, a thorough history on a show that absorbed the creative energies of so many artisans.

Of note is an enthusiastic older commentary by Roger Ebert, who was very much taken by Dark City and went out of his way to praise it.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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Dark City
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent DTS-HD MA 5.1, stereo 2.0 and new Dolby Atmos audio (for both cuts)
New Supplements Director’s Cut
Audio commentary with Alex Proyas
Audio commentary with Craig Anderson, Bruce Isaacs and Herschel Isaacs of Film Versus Film podcast
Documentary Return to Dark City with Alex Proyas, producer Andrew Mason, production designers Patrick Tatopoulos & George Liddle, costume designer Liz Keough, storyboard artist Peter Pound, director of photography Dariusz Wolski, actor Rufus Sewell, hair & makeup artist Leslie Vanderwalt and VFX creative director Peter Doyle
Visual Essay Rats in a Maze by Alexandra West
Visual Essay I’m as Much in the Dark as You Are by Josh Nelson
2008 Supplements Director’s Cut:
Audio commentary by Alex Proyas
Audio commentary by Roger Ebert
Audio commentary by writers Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer
Video introduction by Alex Proyas
Design & Storyboards
2008 Supplements Theatrical Cut
Audio commentary by Proyas, writers Lem Dobbs & David S. Goyer, director of photography Dariusz Wolski and Patrick Tatopoulos
Audio commentary by Roger Ebert
Looking-back cast and crew featurette Memories of Shell Beach
Thematic analysis featurette Architecture of Dreams
Theatrical trailer
Image gallery
60-page illustrated collectors book with essays by Richard Kadrey, Sabina Stent, Virat Nehru and Martyn Pedler
Double-sided fold-out poster with art by Doug John Miller
Three postcards
Postcard from Shell Beach
Dr Schreber business card.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two 4K discs in one Keep case with book and extras in hard sleeve box in card over-sleeve
Reviewed: June 3, 2025
(7337dark)

^*   Somewhere in the 1980s, young directors trying to be hip rediscovered Sergio Leone’s  Once Upon a Time in the West costuming choice of floor-length ‘duster’ coats, which began showing up whenever stylish villains were needed. The trope never went away, but we were dead sick of it after suffering the line of expensively dressed hit men in Simon Wincer’s 1991 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. They look like they belong on a fashion runway.

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