I heard about this movie several years back and it looked pretty interesting and I was fairly impressed by the large amounts of positive reviews it got, and luckily for me, I found the whole movie on YouTube, so I didn't even have to invest one dollar at the local Family Video. I finally found the time to watch it about a month ago and boy was this a deplorable flick.
STORY
The story for Dark City is that John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) finds himself in a bathtub with a murdered prostitute, and gets a phone call from Dr. Daniel P. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) claiming he can help him find his identity, all the while Emma Murdoch (Jennifer Connelley) claiming to be John's wife along with detective Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) and a bunch of pale bald people called the “Strangers” chasing John down.
CHARACTERS
One of the things that really does Dark City in is that the characters are really shallow and uninteresting. I didn't care about a single one of them as the movie went along since they were all nothing but ultra-conventional plot devices. John is the typical semi-geeky antihero, his supposed wife is the initially shady character that you know will switch to the protagonist's side towards the end, and the same can be said for Frank. Of course, the Strangers are typical stock villains with little background, and whatever background is given to them is done only through tacky exposition. The Strangers were laughably pathetic since they're not intimidating whatsoever, they look like a goofy cross between Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies and Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, and best of all, they gather in a large mass and chatter their teeth. The occasional bursts of unintentional laughter kept me from falling asleep.
BAD ACTING
No one really seems to put any effort into their roles in this turkey. The most notable culprits for hamming things up are Sutherland and Hurt, with the former doing a really bad Peter Lorre impersonation throughout the film, and the latter acting as stale and emotionless as possible (Hurt would commit another serious offense in 1998 with that other sci-fi abomination Lost in Space). The others aren't any better and aren't worth my reviewing effort.
LACK OF ORIGINALITY
I'm not against movies being derivative so long as they can overcome their lack of originality by contributing something worthwhile and memorable to the plate (such as Event Horizon). However, with Dark City, you get nothing that you haven't seen before (and done much better in previous films). The city where this movie takes place looks like it was taken right out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Fritz Lang's Metropolis complete with Gothic skyscrapers and with everything being part of the “retro-future” gimmick (including attire, with many people wearing fedora hats). The whole angle of John trying to find his identity was done MUCH BETTER in the Paul Verhoeven masterpiece Total Recall, along with the whole “alternate reality/what's real and what's not” theme being done much better in TR. Director Alex Proyas even takes elements from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. The Strangers do this thing every midnight called “tuning,” which is where they swap the memories and lives of the inhabitants and use their powers to physically change the environment, complete with the skyscrapers building themselves (taken from the ending of the Akira manga). Also, with the overly tacky deus ex machina plot resolver in the form of a needle that gives John the same psychic power as the Strangers, it makes John's character resemble Tetsuo Shima from Akira. Fans have defended these acts of Proyas being derivative and claimed it's “homage” to said works. I don't mind homage, but it's all to clear that Proyas fed off other works just so he didn't have to create anything on his own.
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
If you haven't caught on already, Alex Proyas thinks that you can coast through a movie with nice-looking production sets while having nothing else worthwhile. Granted, the sets for this movie do look pretty impressive, but as stated before, they can't substitute bland characters or ultra-conventional plotting. The supposedly “dark” element isn't even that intimidating since it's just constantly dark out, there's no layers of griminess in the setting to unnerve the audience. Everything, visually speaking, looks too shiny and polished for a movie that's supposed to be “dark.” I bet that when Proyas was creating Dark City, he was speaking to himself “Yeah!! I'm gonna make a retro-future setting where all the technology is set in the 1920's and everyone's wearing vintage clothing!! It's gonna be so cool because many people are gonna think it's different!!” It's all to clear that Proyas ripped off the “retro-future” setting from Brazil and Metropolis just for the sake of being different from the typical sci-fi aesthetics during the 90's.
UNDERSERVED PRAISE
For reasons I can't comprehend, droves of people are calling this one of the best movies ever. Roger Ebert even chose Dark City as his pick for the best movie of 1998 (and this is another reason why I'm rapidily loosing respect for Ebert, but that's another kettle of fish). Can't you see the clear derivative nature of the film and how shallow the plot and characters are? I guess I'm thinking too hard about that since trying to find logic and reason in this area is all for naught.
FINAL WORD
Don't believe the hype on this one. This is NOT the cult retro-future sci-fi masterpiece that people are claiming it to be. You're better off watching Mission of Darkness (if you're 18+), which is one of the most poorly made (story and production-wise) and all around downright terrible anime porn titles in existence. I guarantee that it'll be much more entertaining than Dark City will be.
Don't fall for this shallow copy and just go for Brazil and Metropolis if you want proper retro-future sci-fi.
