Dark City (1998) on Netflix
John Murdoch wakes with no memory in a city where night never ends, wanted for murders he cannot recall. A woman claims to be his wife, and the Strangers are closing in.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.5/10228,628 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Murdoch comes to in a hotel bathtub with his memory gone. The telephone rings: Dr. Daniel Schreber warns him to leave before the men hunting him arrive. In the room he finds a murdered woman and a bloody knife, and he runs as pale men in trenchcoats, the Strangers, reach the door. Inspector Frank Bumstead, investigating the killings of prostitutes, names Murdoch as a suspect. Murdoch discovers his own name and that he has a wife, Emma, though he remembers nothing of her. The city he moves through is stuck in perpetual night, and nobody can tell him the way out. He remembers a coastal town, Shell Beach, and every attempt to reach it fails. When the Strangers corner him, he finds he can change the city around him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dark City (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Daniel P. Schreber, the character played by Kiefer Sutherland, was named after Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge whose autobiographical Memoirs of My Nervous Illness of 1903, written out of his own paranoid psychosis, inspired some elements of the film's plot.
- When Sutherland received the Dark City script he did not understand why it had been sent to him, thinking it was a mistake and that the filmmakers wanted his father, Donald.
- Concerned that audiences would not understand the film, New Line asked Proyas to add an explanatory voice-over to the introduction and he complied; when a director's cut was released in 2008, one of the changes was the removal of that opening narration.
- The Matrix, which was released one year after Dark City, was also filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, and it even used some of Dark City's sets.
- Christopher Nolan said that when he first started thinking about writing Inception he was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento", all based on the principle that the world around you might not be real.
- The set for the lair was 50 ft in height, where an average set is 36 ft, and was built on a fairground in Sydney; with a budget of approximately $27 million, the crew used inexpensive techniques such as stretching canvas onto welded metal frames.
- William Hurt was originally asked to play Dr Schreber before eventually being cast as Inspector Bumstead, and Proyas said Ben Kingsley was one of the original choices to portray Dr Schreber.
