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Dark City
In this city of night, everything you know is wrong
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Dark City
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Rated R
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Starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William
Hurt
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Directed by Alex Proyas
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Review by Patrick Lee
 n a scene reminiscent of birth, John Murdoch (Sewell, of Cold Comfort Farm) awakens with a start in the middle of the night, naked and immersed in a tub of murky water, with no memory of who he is. He stumbles around a dingy hotel room grabbing for clothes, only to discover with horror the mutilated corpse of a blonde woman. Panicked, he flees the hotel and finds himself in a decaying urban nightscape that holds no clue to his origins and no promise of escape.
So begins the latest film from director Alex Proyas, best known for the Brandon Lee comic-inspired revenge fantasy The Crow. Dark City marks an ambitious departure into uncharted realms for Proyas, a disquieting amalgam of film noir, Kafka and science fiction.
What first appears to be a straight-ahead, 40s-tinged murder mystery quickly and quite literally morphs into something altogether different. In the course of unraveling the mystery of his identity, Murdoch finds himself pursued by a retinue of corpse-like men in overcoats and fedoras who possess strange powers and want nothing more than to cut him to pieces with their stilettos. They are called The Strangers. Also on his trail are the meticulous detective Bumstead (Hurt); Emma, the wife he can't remember; and Dr. Schreber (Sutherland), who knows more than he will tell.
As Murdoch struggles to remember his past and figure out who's setting him up, he discovers that the city itself is not what it seems. The sun never rises, and every night at the stroke of 12, everything stops, then transforms, apparently the result of the Strangers' power, called "Tuning." Only the pale men and the enigmatic Dr. Schreber hold the answers Murdoch seeks.
"I feel like I'm living out someone else's nightmare."
Dark City is a true oddity. It feels like half a dozen movies that have come before it, from Metropolis to Brazil to Hellraiser. And its central theme--What constitutes the human soul?--is as old as time itself.
But Proyas has used his prodigious imagination to create something completely new, and at least in the early going, viewers will be seduced and amazed by his dark vision. The early scenes play out like a succession of hallucinations, appropriate to a film that continually asks viewers to question the nature of reality. The production designers, cribbing from Edward Hopper and Fritz Lang, have spared no effort to create a place that seems at once familiar, yet eerily inhuman. The plot's trajectory defies easy guessing, at least at first. And sequences of the city's transformation--the Tuning--are wondrous to behold.
But like most big cities, this one loses its charm after the audience has been there a while. Key scenes between Murdoch and his wife play flat, and the dialogue is awful: "Maybe I have lost my mind, but whoever I am, I'm no killer." Richard O'Brien (best known as Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) gives a nice creepiness to the head Stranger, inexplicably named Mr. Hand, and Sutherland does a nice job playing the doctor as a stammering weasel. But the other actors sleepwalk through their performances.
The main reason the film fails, though, is because it doesn't fulfill its promise. Proyas and co-writers Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer clearly wanted to make a thoughtful film in the best traditions of SF, but their work lacks real tension and suspense. Too much is revealed too soon, and when the dark secrets are made plain, they are overly literal and unsatisfying. Most disappointing is that, while the film dares to raise intriguing questions, it doesn't have the courage to answer them in any depth.
I really wanted to like Dark City, and was willing to take Proyas's one-way subway ride through his city of night. But I feel like I was left at the platform.
-- P.L.
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Sphere
Voyage to see what's on the bottom
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Sphere
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Rated PG-13
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Starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson
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Directed by Barry Levinson
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Review by Patrick Lee
 phere is the latest of the big-budget feature films to be based on the books or ideas of prolific techno-thriller master Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park). It was adapted from Crichton's book of the same name, which was published in 1987.
The story begins as Dr. Norman Goodman (Hoffman), consulting psychiatrist to the Bush Administration, finds himself on a chopper en route to the middle of the Pacific, ostensibly to aid the survivors of a plane crash. But when he arrives at the rescue fleet, he discovers that he's actually supposed to lead a team of crack scientists to explore an unknown craft beneath the sea--a team that was assembled based on his own recommendations of how best to handle the first encounter with extraterrestrials.
The team consists of mathematician Harry Adams (Jackson), biochemist Beth Halperin (Stone), astrophysicist Ted Fielding (Liev Schreiber of Scream II) and the mysterious government spook Harold Barnes (Peter Coyote). The craft they're being sent to investigate is a half-mile-long spaceship that has been underwater for nearly 300 years. And the power is still running.
The group, which is rife with interpersonal tensions, suits up and descends 1,000 feet to a ready-made habitat on the ocean floor. From there, they set out to explore the craft. But the more they discover, the less it makes sense. More ominously, the craft contains a shimmering golden sphere whose purpose is a complete mystery.
As the team settles in to deal with this mystery, they are unexpectedly cut off from the surface by a storm. And that's when things start to go wrong.
Sphere plumbs new depths
Sphere is a tired retread of themes and situations already explored in many better films, including Forbidden Planet, The Thing, The Abyss and Crichton's own Andromeda Strain.
Despite a stellar cast under the direction of Barry Levinson (Disclosure, also based on a Crichton bestseller), Sphere never really catches fire, even when things actually do catch fire on the set. The film's intriguing concept, which plays on the paranoia and tensions among the principal characters, is squandered in a series of flaccid action sequences. Between these set pieces, the characters seem to sit around in their underlit, high-tech ant farm beneath the sea and argue about past conflicts and petty jealousies. It almost makes viewers root for the implacable forces that want to tear the habitat apart.
There are also a lot of wisecracks that substitute for real humor in the movie. When the sphere--which moviegoers come to know as "Jerry"--issues the cryptic message, "I make a journey, you make a journey, we make a journey together," Stone's character cracks, "I think Jerry is channeling Deepak Chopra."
The movie's payoffs, when they finally do arrive, disappoint. When viewers see the spacecraft for the first time, it is through so much murky water that it's difficult to make head or tail of it. Later, the audience is set up to deal with a giant squid, but they never see so much as a single tentacle. The sphere itself is mostly cool to look at, but it's basically inert. And that about sums up the entire movie.
If Sphere does well, I'm afraid for the future. What next: Michael Crichton's Address Book: The Movie?
-- P.L.
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