Tales That Defy the Ordinary

Sharp takes on film, culture, history, nostalgia, and the curious corners of human life. With side-glances at nature, thought, and satire. Jackdaw Posts isn’t your average blog. Not quite a magazine.

But always worth the read.

Dark City (1998): Memory, Murk & Manufactured Moonlight

They don’t make films like this anymore. Hell, they barely made them back then. Dark City crawled out of the late-‘90s like a trenchcoat-wearing fever dream—equal parts Kafka and comic book, German Expressionism smeared in greenish grease and nicotine. It’s what happens when film noir takes a hallucinogen and wakes up on a slab with no memory, no sun, and a pocket full of riddles.

Directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow), this 1998 tech-noir cult classic arrived a year before The Matrix and got mostly ignored. Wrong timing. Wrong marketing. Wrong world. Critics were confused. Audiences stayed home. But the film quietly endured. Today, Dark City feels like the older, wiser brother of every simulation-themed thriller that came after it. Less kung fu, more existential dread.

 

Black and white illustration of a dystopian city at night with a full moon overhead.
Welcome to the experiment: no sun, no exits, and your personality’s been reassigned. Again.

The Setup: Amnesia as Architecture

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell, sharp-eyed and sharp-jawed) wakes up in a bathtub, alone, confused, and possibly a murderer. The city he stumbles through is eternal night—a grimy, labyrinthine sprawl of 1940s architecture and postmodern confusion, with no exit and no sunrise. People vanish. Identities change. Memories rewrite themselves. Even the buildings move when you're not looking.

That’s not paranoia. That’s plot.

The world is run by a race of pale, cadaverous beings called The Strangers—alien puppeteers who wear fedoras, float like goth monks, and “tune” reality using telekinetic jazz hands. They’re experimenting on humans to learn what makes a soul. Why? Because their species is dying. Empathy as last resort.

They reshuffle lives at midnight, swapping professions, backstories, and traumas. You're a butcher at noon, a violinist by dusk. Nobody notices. Except Murdoch. He's broken the loop, and he’s starting to remember—or invent—a life of his own.

Themes: Who Are You When the Lights Go Out?

Dark City is less concerned with plot than with paranoia. Memory is malleable. Identity is performance. Reality is… negotiated. In a city where even the buildings lie to you, the only truth is rebellion.

This isn't a film about solving a mystery. It's about realising you were the mystery all along.

In that sense, Dark City is not sci-fi dressed as noir. It’s noir inside out. The femme fatale (Jennifer Connelly) might be your wife. Or she might be someone else's dream. The cop (William Hurt) is tired, weary, and right. The doctor (Kiefer Sutherland, twitching through a Peter Lorre impression) is complicit and broken. And you? You’re either the hero or a lab rat with delusions of grandeur.

The city itself is the main character: a Metropolis-meets-Gotham chimera, stitched from German horror, ‘40s pulp, and Orwellian surveillance. Every street is a trap. Every window a lie. And above it all, the stars that don’t exist.

Context: The Forgotten Godfather of Simulation Cinema

Let’s get one thing straight. The Matrix didn’t invent the “we live in a simulation” genre. Dark City did it first—and weirder.

Released a year before the Wachowskis’ bullet-dodging juggernaut, Dark City was shot on the same Sydney sound stages, used similar costume departments, and even borrowed some of the same sets. The overlap is uncanny. The difference? Where The Matrix leaned into sleek kung fu mythology, Dark City was content to be a brooding, fog-drenched puzzle box.

Roger Ebert famously called it the best film of 1998 and even recorded a full-length commentary for the DVD. But general audiences were baffled. The studio, in its infinite wisdom, spoiled the twist with an unnecessary opening voiceover—Sutherland explaining everything before the story even starts.

Luckily, the Director’s Cut (2008) fixed that. No intro monologue. Cleaner pacing. Extended scenes. It’s the definitive version. If you’re watching for the first time, start there.

The Science Behind the Madness

Okay, let’s pull back the curtain. The Strangers aren’t just spooky bald men with powers. They’re a dying alien collective inhabiting dead human bodies, attempting to understand individuality by injecting people with artificial memories and observing their behaviour.

It’s not far off from certain real-life psychological experiments—like John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25 rat utopia or aspects of social conditioning studied under Skinner and Milgram. The city is a petri dish. Identity is a variable. And free will? That’s the anomaly Murdoch becomes.

There’s also a philosophical echo of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: most people accept the shadows on the wall as reality. But Murdoch breaks his chains, walks outside, and finds… not light, but artificial stars. It's metaphysics with a noir haircut.

Wit in the Wires: Subtle Satire in a Grimy Coat

There’s a quiet joke buried under the grime. The Strangers, for all their power, are trying to figure out what it means to be human—by imitating us. But they get it hilariously wrong. They mistake job titles for personality, trauma for depth, routine for meaning. It's corporate humanism gone off the rails. Kafka meets a corporate PowerPoint.

Murdoch, by contrast, discovers his humanity by rejecting the roles. He stops reacting and starts choosing. That’s freedom: not knowing who you are, but deciding it anyway.

In a way, Dark City satirises every societal script: the idea that you are your résumé, your childhood, your postcode. The Strangers treat people like spreadsheets. Murdoch rewrites the code.

And then, in the final act, he literally reshapes the world with his mind.

Not bad for a guy who started the film naked in a bathtub.

Final Thoughts: Noir in the Age of Neural Nets

Dark City remains a masterpiece that never quite found its moment. It’s too strange for sci-fi fans, too cerebral for horror junkies, and too stylish for people who demand neat answers.

But that’s its power.

It’s the kind of film that lingers. A shadow behind your eyes. A thought you didn’t have yesterday. It’s noir with neural implants, philosophy in a trenchcoat. And it asks a question more relevant than ever:

If your entire life was a script—memories fake, city artificial, and past manufactured—what would you fight for?

In the end, Murdoch doesn’t just escape the nightmare. He rewrites it. He makes a beach. He makes a sunrise. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the most human act of all.

Jackdaw Rating: 8/10

Bleak, brilliant, and criminally overlooked. A neo-noir simulation fable that deserved better—and might finally be getting it.

 


 

The original trailer for the sci-fi noir that got buried in its own shadows. Trailer via Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers on YouTube.

Further Reading

Most Popular — Of All Time

The Rocketeer (1991) – A Good Idea That Never Quite Takes Off

Image
Los Angeles, 1938. The world is on the brink of war. Hollywood is a neon-lit dream, full of gangsters, movie stars, and fast-talking dames. A stunt pilot finds a rocket pack and suddenly, he’s dodging bullets and soaring above the city like something out of a pulp magazine. Sounds like the perfect adventure, right? It should be. But The Rocketeer —Disney’s 1991 tribute to old-school serials and mid-century swashbuckling—never quite takes off. It’s a film that looks great, has all the right ingredients, but never fully commits to the thrill. It wants to soar. Instead, it hesitates.   Movie poster by John Mattos   A Throwback to a Time That Never Was Directed by Joe Johnston (yes, the guy who later gave us Captain America: The First Avenger ), The Rocketeer is pure pulp adventure, a love letter to old serials, comic books, and a time when heroes wore leather jackets and flew with reckless abandon. It’s based on Dave Stevens’ 1982 comic, itself a nostalgic nod to the 1930s. The...
Read more

Climbing Higher, Breathing Less: The Reinhold Messner Way

Image
They say the mountains don’t care. They don’t care if you’re strong or weak, bold or afraid. They don’t care if you’re Reinhold Messner or some guy who thought hiking boots were optional. But Messner cared. Not about the mountains’ indifference, but about meeting them on their own brutal terms. No oxygen tanks. No safety nets. No excuses. Just a man, a summit, and the thin line in between called survival.   One man, one mountain, no mercy. The Man Who Climbed Before He Climbed Reinhold Messner was born on September 17, 1944, in Brixen, South Tyrol, a rugged sliver of northern Italy where the Dolomites rise like broken teeth against the sky. He grew up in their shadow, which is perhaps the best place to grow if you intend to spend your life chasing summits. By five, he was climbing peaks most kids wouldn’t dare draw. His father, a stern schoolteacher with military roots, taught him discipline. The mountains taught him everything else. Messner’s Mountaineering Philosophy Before Messn...
Read more

USS Eldridge and the Philadelphia Experiment: Fact, Fiction, or Cover-Up?

Image
In 1943, a U.S. Navy ship supposedly vanished—then reappeared miles away. The story of the Philadelphia Experiment has baffled, thrilled, and amused ever since. Was it science, myth, or something stranger lurking beneath the waves? Let's lift the fog. The Philadelphia Experiment: When War Met Wonder and Vanished Project Rainbow: War Games and Wishful Thinking The world burned. Steel-clad ships cut the Atlantic. And somewhere in a Navy lab thick with wires and ambition, a strange idea flickered to life. The story begins with Project Rainbow , a hush-hush U.S. Navy initiative whispered to involve more than sonar and sweat. According to lore—and we stress the lore—they weren’t just building ships. They were building ghosts . Invisible ones. Enter the USS Eldridge , a destroyer escort built for the nuts and bolts of convoy protection. But it was picked for something grander. Something science-fictional. The plan? Wrap it in electromagnetism. Bend light. Maybe bend time. Make i...
Read more

Not Quite Trending. Not Quite Dead. Too Stubborn to Die.