Some movies just don't age well

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2014)

A few of the problems with Dark City:
-Two-dimensional characters it's hard to care about or engage with. In the case of Rufus Sewell, he has the excuse that he's playing a character with no memory. But really there's not a single real person here, though William Hurt comes close.
-Silly visual effects. The shape-shifting architecture was fine, but the Strangers floating thru the city, and worst, the laughable 'mind-battle' between Sewell and Ian Richardson at the end, oh dear.
-One of the worst music scores I've ever heard. All swelling strings, telling you what emotion you should feel in every scene, ugh. I thought that went out of style in 1958.
-Why does the city look like a 1940s film noir? Because the director thought it was cool?
-The Strangers can manipulate things with their minds, yet they go around menacing people with knives?? Why not a gun then? I guess if they could have simply shot the hero, the movie would have been really short.
-Um, did anyone notice that all the Strangers are men? Yo, menacing bald albino guys--want to know why your race is dying out? No women! How do you reproduce?
I think, though, the real issue is that the movie just ages badly. It was much lauded when it was released, and Roger Ebert named it his Best Film of the Year. If I had seen it when it came out, I'm guessing I would have been a lot kinder. (I had a similar experience when I saw Fight Club, about ten years after it came out; it was good, but I didn't really understand all the hype.) Certainly it would seem that Dark City was a major influence on the television show Fringe, whose Observers were more or less a copy of its fedora-wearing mysterious bald guys. But there's just no emotional investment here. Once you learn that identities are constantly reset, along with memories, all of the human characters essentially become props. This kind of story works better in a shorter format; as an episode of The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, it might have succeeded.