Good film, bad ending (major spoilers).

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2000)

When I went to see Dark City I didn't really have such high hopes for it. The trailer had been excellent, but remembering the directors previous effort, the highly overrated Crow, I expected Dark City to be nothing more than a violent and silly gothic fantasy. So you can guess that I was positively surprised, when the film turned out to be an intriguing science fiction mystery with a touch of film noir. The actors were mostly good and Dark City even payed homage to many of my favorite movies and comics (the basic idea may even have been borrowed from one of Mézières' and Christin's classic Valerian comic books "Sur les Terres Truquées"), so I was beginning to change my opinion about Alex Proyas as a director. Dark City was just as stylish as Crow, but it had much more content. Unfortunately, during the final scenes, the script showed the same weakness Crow suffered from; Dark City is unable to come up with a satisfactory ending, so it resorts to clichés. I guess it really wasn't that big a surprise, since this problem has been far too evident with most sci-fi films of the nineties, including Strange Days and Matrix.
In fact Dark City shared the exact same problem with The Matrix: the intellectual premise didn't quite match up with the stupid FX ending. Admittedly, The Matrix didn't pretend to be more than an action flick with some interesting-but-overused sci-fi themes, so it's ending (with the kung fu fights and "kiss to awaken the dead" scene) was not as disappointing as is the ending of Dark City. Dark City at least had some originality and intellect, which is why I find it hard to understand why it had to end with an FX-enhanced good-guy-versus-bad-guy fight. When the hero threw the bad guy through the water tank, remembering that the aliens can't stand water (for reasons unexplained), it really made me want to cry out loud. If that wasn't a major cliché (and a stupid one too), what is?
Also, although the final scene in Dark City did a bit to redeem the film, it's quite hard to believe that the guy could live in his world knowing what it truly is. He should at least have had his memories erased, in the same manner the traitor in The Matrix wanted his knowledge of The Matrix to be deleted.
Not to sound too critical, I must say that, the ending excluded, I think Dark City is a clever and beautifully visualized film. Still, as a science fiction fan, I find it sad that there have been three recent films toying with the old sci-fi idea of fake reality (Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix), and the best one of these three is The Truman Show which isn't even a sci-fi flick.