It's an Experiment!

Rating: Null/10 (27 November 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Writing IMDB comments is an interesting business that often benefits from some relaxation. For instance, I saw Carpenter's Vampire movie and was struck by how poor it was. So I rushed off a comment trying to say some insightful things about the ways in which it was bad. Then the next day -- after getting my life back -- it struck me that the movie itself was a vampire, a lifeless dead entity that keeps coming back in different forms, all more or less the same. These get their life by sucking it out of us.
I had a similar experience with Dark City, which had the unhappy coincidence of having been seen by me immediately after Seven Samuri. Kurosawa's movie was effortless, full of life, original. City in contrast was labored, dead, strikingly unoriginal. I patiently listened to the DVD comment by Ebert. Now Ebert is no great intellect, but he does seem to know the art. And here he is, gushing over scene after scene with the most vapid of insights.
Moreover, this film finished my concentrated survey of similar themes: Matrix, 13th Floor, Strange Days, eXistenZ, and 9 more, plus some odd outliers. eXistenZ had real scifi meat: artificial layers creating new layers and conspiracies crossing layers and reversing, and with a coherent vision and logic. Not so with City which has a tired old device, not very coherently supported from the scifi perspective. Dismayed, I went to bed.
Now, with fresh morning light, it dawns on me that this film is a pretty wonderful example of what it purports to be about. In retrospect, quite a few films are like this -- for instance we often have a film whose `message' is to value the more important elements in life and eschew the trivial. But then it tells the story in a way that can only be received if you pay attention to the trivial. An example pulled randomly from the barrel: `Legally Blond.'
And so we have here. Dark City is a world created from past memories by pseudo-people who have no originality or creativity. This world is one in which ordinary people like us are supposed to interact as if it didn't just appear. See? Like the city, the film has no original notions at all, everything is borrowed from a well-established vocabulary from the past. And this is true of every element from the set design, lighting, dialog, even Keifer's accent. The people who created this can mimic that vocabulary with high production values, but there is no soul here. They started with parts and ended with parts glued to the old quest saga. Could have been an intelligent movie if they know what they were doing.
The only question is how YOU responded to the experiment. Did you understand it was a prison to escape or at least control and reshape? Or did you behave as you were meant to?