ingredients : man with amnesia who wakes up wanted for murder , dark science fiction city controlled by alien beings with mental powers . synopsis : what if you woke up one day , and suspected you were not on earth , and instead were part of an experiment in a giant space terrarium manipulated by intergalactic alien zookeepers ? in dark city john murdoch ( rufus sewell ) has this problem . dark city starts out like a 1940s noir amnesia detective mystery . poor john wakes up with amnesia in a hotel room with a dead dame in one corner . a mysterious phone call tells him to get the heck out of there , and soon enough john is chased all over town by a murderous army of pale people in black trench-coats , as well as by the police , and the dogged inspector bumstead ( william hurt ) . is john a murderer , and what can his missing memories tell him ? he searches through his own wallet for possible contacts and clues . but when the clues don't fit , it doesn't just confuse him ; it causes john to go so far as to question the whole nature of reality in the dark city . to john , something is fishy , and very unreal about this city . how come it's always dark , and nobody seems to remember what they did this morning ? and how come nobody seems to remember how to leave the city , or how to get to nearby shell beach ? every night , around midnight , john notices that the whole city enters a state of suspended animation , and at this time , creepy alien experimenters known as the 'strangers' come out and do nasty things like inject fake memories into people's heads with big hypodermic needles . the strangers have the ability to 'tune , ' or warp reality using telepathic powers . turns out , the city is not on earth at all . and the reason why john doesn't fall victim to the nightly suspended animation , is because he is a human mutation that possesses the same god-like reality-warping abilities as the strangers . even with the help of scientist dr . daniel schreber , can john take back the dark city ? opinion : director alex proyas ( he also directed the crow ) mentions this in the dark city press kit : in films , science fiction is always " used to have big spaceships blow up cities . i think we're a little tired of that . " according to director proyas , probably the most interesting thing about dark city is its layers . it's designed so that you can watch the film over again , and examine it from the perspective of a main character other than murdoch . it's a philosophical piece . cinematic science fiction is basically a thinly disguised shootout between the good humans and the bad aliens ( whether they be klingons , giant bugs , or proponents of the dark side of the force ) . but science fiction in books reaches beyond the 'shoot-em-up' level and targets the big questions , questions like who are we ? what is the human condition ? what is ethical ? what would a true human being do ? far from comic book style on the order of spawn , batman , or the mutant ninja turtles , dark city not only features the showdown between good humans and powerful aliens , but it also asks questions worthy of films such as brazil or blade runner . dark city is what philosophers would call an existentialist screenplay . a little more than 200 years ago , the world was filled with unhappy peasants - - unhappy because nearly every aspect of their lives was controlled by totalitarian , military , conformist , medieval regimes . the people took refuge in religion , the idea being that earthly life was a time of suffering , but after death , heaven would be available . meanwhile , the state used these same ideas to prop up their regimes ; the king was often head of the religion and therefore sanctioned by heaven . when science finally overturned religion , the medieval dictatorships came tumbling down and were replaced by democratic governments . but the new fear was that the power of science and experimentation would be used to create a world order as darkly totalitarian as the old . this is the time period when writers and philosophers such as freud , kant , kafka , nietzsche , and dostoevsky pondered what society should be , and what place the individual had in it . the existentialists' in particular wrote about the power of the lone individual against what may be a hostile , indifferent , or alienated universe . in dark city , when the last dying , defeated alien asks john murdoch why the aliens' scientific experiments on the human beings' brains failed , murdoch replies , pointing to his head , " because the human condition isn't located in here . "
