Typically it's Tim Burton who leads the field in gothic filmmaking, but up and coming director, Alex Proyas has become the new champ. His first non-music-video work, The Crow, showed that he new how to handle a camera, special effects, plus elicit strong acting from weaker actors, and create beautiful work in the face of adversity. In the same fashion, Proyas' Dark City is an overlooked triumph of the cinematic medium, delivering strong acting, a fresh story and original script, as well as a beautiful looking picture.
Dark City is a nightmare come to life, a waking dream on film, where things are there and then they're gone or changed. The story's not complex, but it is difficult to explain. Dark City is two worlds upon it's own, there are the people who live there, and then there are the people who live under there. An alien species has inhabited the dead bodies of humans, and, in an effort to understand humanity (and to learn about the soul) try to save themselves from extinction. They study the humans in the city by changing them, then observing their change. They do this with the aide of Dr. Daniel Poe Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a human psychiatrist. He works with the aliens on the principal that he can mix personalities and memories, and interpret the results after the new mixes have been implanted in the subjects. To do this mind switch, the aliens stop the clock every night at midnight, go around planting new memories while wiping old ones, as well as reshaping the city with tremendous mental powers, recreating and redesigning it's streets, its buildings, everything.
But everything doesn't flow as smoothly as one night, while the Dr. is implanting John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) with new memories (during frozen time) and he wakes up. The movie in whole follows Murdoch as he tries to peice together his fragmented memories, deal with the group of creepy men who want him dead (they're aliens), avoiding the cop (William Hurt) who is chasing him (he was a murderer in his previous incarnation), tries to figure out if his love for his wife (Jennifer Connely) is really that, and as he discovers the truth about the city that never sees daylight.
Suspenseful, intriguing, and unexplainably cool, Dark City is a blending of style and substance. The script by Proyas and David S. Goyer, seems to be a Vonnegut meets comic books story, very imaginative, and completely artistic. Dark City is sci-fi meets horror meets mystery by way of art-house filmmaking. Truly unique, and easily one of 1998's best films.