Movies We're Thankful For: Dark City

I respect that you like it, but I found it to be mediocre. The purpose of the plot seemed to be only to confuse and irritate the viewer. I saw it after hearing so many people say it was one of their favorites, and waiting till it's Blu-ray release.

Aside from that, it felt so so long, and even after sitting through the Director's Cut length only 1 month ago, I can't remember anything about it except for Jennifer Connelly's unibrow and the Truman Show set in the final scene.

I just didn't get it... I liked the actors, but the story was too much. It seems they didn't want the film to be a blockbuster, otherwise they'd have made it easier to understand.

Just my opinion of course, but I've seen better fantasy films.

- http://UncoveredFilms.blogspot.com

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I found it to be totally average too. I didn't find it interesting at all.

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Every single time someone posts about Dark City, I feel the need to make the following points:

The editing blows, and the performances are some of the worst I've seen in a film so widely acclaimed. (Keifer Sutherland and his horrible impersonation of Peter Lorre is enough to shoot the film down, and Jennifer Connelly's deer-in-the-headlights "performance" does it in.) If Ebert hadn't given Alex Proyas a rim job, no one would have ever heard of this film.

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I haven't seen this in a loooong time, but I do remember that at the time, I was pissed off that they had stolen so much stuff from "City of Lost Children" . Just by the screen shot you posted I can remember them ripping of the Cyclop's look and feel from Lost children...

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Odd serendipity, but I just happened to watch this yesterday. Okay, maybe not so odd given the recent release of the new Director's Cut, but still...

Yes, Kiefer Sutherland's horrible speaking style almost ruins the entire movie for me. I, too, remarked upon Jennifer Conolly's thick eyebrows - obviously in 1998 razor-thin brows stil weren't derigeur. And finally, while I remember HATING the staccato editing style when the fllm first came out, I know marvel at how prescient the style is now (see Quantum of Solace for the most recent ADD example) and had no problem keeping up with it nor found myself being as annoyed.

What most viewers don't remember - and what I think makes this a penultimate classic - is that this film came out BEFORE The Matrix, in, I believe 1998 or so (yes, I'm too lazy on this rainy day-before-Thanksgiving to actually look it up), ushering in a semi-Golden AGe of Hollywood moviemaking (Dark City, The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, Seven). It was also made on a dime, which makes its imaginative and original world that much more amazing to behold.

Its flaws aside, this is still a stunning piece of filmmaking.

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I love Dark City.

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They ripped off the cenobites from Hellraiser - that's about all I remember disliking about Dark City. Maybe I should watch it again.

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I quite liked it ( and was fortunate enough to watch the Director's Cut first ), but I think it was an achievement of cinematic technique and approach more than anything. It was basically noir film as funneled through Dr. Caligiari surrealism. That's what's really great about it. The whole thing was more invested in taking film language to fresh, newer places, both visually, stylistically and presentation of ideas - w/c is what makes stuff like a reconstructed 40's esque human city lying directly atop a spaceship ( I suppose, and - will you look at that - SPOILERS ! ) perfectly acceptable. It's not logical, by any means, and frankly, it doesn't make sense, yet it is rather functional in its' own immitable way. You can take it to be method of consistency to the type of story they're on, in the same way you ' justify ' Tim Burton and his architecturally unstable swirly buildings. But it's cool in how it literalizes the raw, blatant combining of the two genres, two approaches of noir and sci-fi , run across each other on a parallel. Or the endless milieu, and it's pitch-black machinations.

Personally, I found most appealing the metafictional purpose of it, as Alex Proyas elaborated a bit on in a previous interview - given that the movie was basically a meditation on that type of fiction, the Strangers' vessel, or what have you, stands as both a representation, as well as a blatant actualization of that ' dark heart ' that lies in the heart of noir', and perhaps, reality, that makes murderers and schemers out of anyone; whose agents subject them to sadisti moral and psychological conundrums and desires most elusive for human study and analysis - thus implicating noir practitioners for routinely drawing that shit up, in a 4th wall-breaking sort of way. Which is why the key most original, iconoclastic part of the movie was when the lead guy, having taken charge of his own fiction - and apparently everybody else's - pulls the world's governing machineries up to the ground, and in the process, destroying them - laying out the conspiracy's carcass for all to see.

That's really one way you could appreciate the whole thing . Physics won't be so kind.

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Plotwise ... er, I dunno. Hero is lost, hero finds himself, hero faces down and destroys the bad guys, hero gets what he wants. ( The Jennifer Connely character was practically a cypher. ) But that may have to do with the Clinton '90s, where everything ( save for the indies, I guess ) had to be wistful, on happy, high note . Sunlight spreading across the ' Dark City ' towards the end was just pushing it.

I've found similar problems with ' L.A. Confidential ' , and even ‘ Fargo ’, too - which starts off as these sort of headstrong, true to word, ' dark ' stuff; yet somehow gets all too saccharine in the end ( they just had to ham up that whole deal with ‘ Anna ’ and the beach and shit, instead of closing with classy ambiguity. Hollywood just had to come out there and tell you they’re gonna be ‘ more ‘n friends ’. Her character was incidental, anyway; so what the hell ? ). They had to wait for stuff like ‘ Seven ’ and ‘ Fight Club ’ to show them the way, but even those stuff were ' few and far between ' in the mainstream during those times.

God bless ' No Country for Old Men '.

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