Convoluted, stylish, but lacking soul

Rating: 7/10 (13 August 1999)

Dark City is a tremendous undertaking for the viewer, and it scores well. In fact, if there were no such movie as The Matrix, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more thoroughly. This film of course predates Matrix, but nevertheless it barely touches on a great deal of the material that Matrix illustrates so beautifully. The premises of the movies are, at their core, the same - that reality is not at all what it seems. But while the Matrix picks its implications - for instance, while in this film the relationship among wife and family are paramount, in Matrix
they are completely ignored - here the plot bogs down around the wife, the
steely investigator, and the main character. At the same time it fails to explain enough about the strangers or their perplexing abilities, and leaves keifer sutherland to carry much of the life of the movie. Visually it's grand stuff, and I have always admired Proyas>