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 . " 
