Dark City

* [Description]:
Slightly surreal, very weird, completely delightful movie. Stars Kieffer Sutherland, William Hurt, and, less delightfully, Jennifer Connelly and Rufus Sewell.
Dark City is set in a city where it is always night, and where time and memory work in odd ways. The inhabitants have no fixed past, but only the edited and remixed memories given to them by the “Strangers” who run the city, and who, at regular intervals, alter its layout and structure by “tuning,” a process that seems to consist of shared mental control of a set of machines comparable to those used to construct “simulated” worlds in Bester’s Psychoshop.
We eventually learn the city is a testing ground where a race of collectively conscious aliens attempt to isolate human individuality (or the human “soul”) so that they can use it to adapt their dying species. To this end they force Dr. Schreber (Sutherland) to extract memories (by syringe) from the human inhabitants, alter them, and then implant them in others. Eventually, however, one of these inhabitants begins to resist the “imprinting”, and Sutherland’s character takes advantage of this to set in motion a plan to give this resistant human a fighting chance against the Strangers.
The story primarily follows the struggles of Murdoch (the savior-figure, played by Sewell), his sometimes-wife (Connelly), and a hardened police detective (William Hurt) as they wrestle with their protean memories and try to extract facts, meaning, and the all-important location of Shell Beach.
For more on this movie and why it’s better than [The Matrix], see the linked LJ post below.
Note: Apparently Sutherland’s character, and the movie at large, are based in part on a historical Schreber, who is one of the more famous crazies of all time, and who wrote a book called “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” which details his experiences. He seems to be an important source for later psychoanalytic theory. Possibly more on him later…
h2. Links
* http://imdb.com/title/tt0118929/quotes * http://www.livejournal.com/users/kukkurovaca/39437.html
h2. Bibliography
* Schreber, Daniel Paul * Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
h2. See also
* The Matrix * Kief
Created on August 23, 2005 02:44 by Nick Shere