*Note: This review pertains to the Director’s Cut*
[7.0/10] I don’t know what it is about the nineties that gave us this type of film. Whether it’s *Dark City*, or *City of Lost Children*, or even *The Matrix*, it seems like that decade provided unique opportunities for reality-challenging, green-tinted art deco, chosen one stories about breaking through an oppressive, kafkaesque system. There’s the same grimy trippiness, the same sort of heady themes wrapped in a quasi-blockbuster package, and the same sense of dreamlike, steampunk meets futurism designs at play.
*Dark City* is a solid rendition of the form, leaning a bit more into the noir aspects before diving headlong into science fiction, but I couldn’t help seeing the bits and pieces other films borrowed from it, or the way that later works played in the same space. If you take *Dark City* and subtract *City of Lost Children*, you basically end up with *Memento* and the same sort of “Who are we really?”-questioning, cinematic identity crisis. If you throw in some secret identities and take away a bit of sci-fi, you get what comes off like a spiritual successor to the Tim Burton Batman films. If you want to focus more on the normal guy stuck in an abnormal world, you can default to *Brazil*.
And if you’re interested in another work featuring maze-like imagery, individuals having their identities swapped out and tampered with, growing realizations about that ethically-questionable walled garden, co-written by one of the screenwriters of *The Dark Knight*, you can even pop over to HBO and watch *Westworld*.
With all that shared DNA, what makes *Dark City* memorable and distinctive? The production design and special effects for one. Even twenty years later, where CGI is omnipresent and representing just about anything on screen is within the realm of the possible, there’s a fair amount of “how did they do that?” at play here. The titular metropolis morphs and shifts and transmografies itself as the film’s villains rearrange and reorchestrate it in a wild, urban ballet. Nothing sells the otherworldliness of this place better than those dramatic visual flourishes amid the film’s big reveal.
But even when the movie isn’t wowing you with its effects, the look and feel of this peculiar city grabs you from the earliest moments of the film. There too, there’s touches of outsized design and decor that Tim Burton would popularize in the 1990s and that successors like *Sin City* would pick up. But the quasi-futuristic noir aesthetic, the brutalist intricacies of the Strangers’ home base, the occasional lurid greens and other flashes of color buried in the sturm und drang give the film a particular character even if you were to watch it on mute.
There’s also plenty of interesting thoughts going on under the hood. At base, the film asks probing questions about how we define who we are, the extent to which our identities are mutable, and how we make meaning in a world constructed without it. The notion of extraterrestrial beings toying with our minds and our environment as one grand study of the human soul, something they claim to lack, creates plenty of opportunities to dramatize those queries in a fashion that only science fiction can achieve.
And yet, the film slowly but surely breaks down after its big reveal. The times when John Murdock and others grapple with the senselessness of their existence captures a certain sense of existentialist ennui and anxiety. Once the truth is unveiled, there’s plenty of faux-portentous dialogue trying to unpack it. But from there on out, the film becomes more and more a mere vehicle for those ideas and an ambitious but familiar actioner than a propulsive and original story.
In the end, John Murdock is the chosen one. He breaks free from his oppressors and uses his powers to defeat them, and a new day dawns. Sure, at a certain level of generality you can break down pretty much every film into broad tropes. But *Dark City* mixes fairly standard noir and chosen one story beats, and hopes you won’t notice because you’re too wrapped up in the movie’s exquisite texture. That texture is fantastic, but at a certain point it’s hard to discern why we should care about these people.
Aside from the costuming, the styling, and the world they inhabit, none of the film’s central personalities are particularly memorable. Rufus Sewell’s John Murdoch is the standard issue nineties film protagonist, with little beyond his superpowers to distinguish him. Jennifer Connelly is the usual femme fatale; William Hurt is the usual gumshoe, and the cadre of bald, creepy-looking alien inhabitants are memorable for their look and demeanor, but not for any particular sort of internal life, even the one who steals John’s memories. Only Keifer Sutherland really stands out, and that’s mostly because he goes full ham as the quisling human assisting his alien oppressors. It’s a choice, but not necessarily a good one.
That’s the major problem with *Dark City*. For all that outstanding design-work and all the intriguing ideas the film’s infused with, it struggles to tie any of it to characters worth investing in. The dialogue is leaden; the performances are broad and unconvincing, and the story is a big ball of mush rolling down a grassy hill rather than a clear, building narrative. Part of that sludge-y story sense helps contribute to the intentionally disorienting qualities of the film, putting the audience in the same shoes as its protagonist. But it doesn't stop when all of the screenwriters’ cards are on the table, suggesting it was an accidental result rather than a deliberate choice, or at least something they didn’t know when to stop.
The aesthetics alone are reason enough to stop by *Dark City*. The philosophical underpinnings of its Allegory of the Cave-like tale provide plenty of reasons to chew on the film’s implications. But those ideas often feel unfinished and not fully realized, wrapped up in people and plot points that can’t quite support those lofty themes nor justify the narrative on their own. The great elements of the film -- its look, its feel, and its ideas -- just barely outweigh the nuts and bolts narrative and character choices that leave it as something a little lesser than its influences, contemporaries, or successors.
Plex 
Kodi 
Stremio 
Jellyfin 
Netflix 
Disney+ 
Prime Video 
HBO Max 
Trakt 
TMDB 
Letterboxd 
IMDb 
Simkl 
TVTime 
Australia
United States
