Dark, moody, clever, and quite silly

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2004)

First, just for the record, this film did not rip off 'The Matrix'. It came out a year earlier. Such arguments seem pointless to me anyway, since the basic premise both of these movies, plus 'The Thirteenth Floor', 'The Truman Show', 'Pleasantville', et al are so blatantly appropriated from Philip K Dick's SF of the 1950's.
Never mind that, though. This is another "What is reality" film (a question Dick apparently used to pose himself every morning); this time the variation being that an alien race has abducted a city of humans and is performing experiments on them to try to find out the nature of the human soul. That isn't a spoiler, BTW. In fact the very first thing that happens in this film is that the narrator tells you what I just told you. You can't help but wonder if it might have served to achieve a better sense of mystery if they hadn't thought to lay that on you in the first 30 seconds, but the film manages to be quite suspenseful all the same.
'Dark City' is directed by the bloke who brought us 'The Crow', which I thought was utter rubbish. It has a similar dark, stylised look, which will probably appeal to goths - but in 'Dark City' there is at least a reason for this perpetual night.
'Dark City' is SF, nominally, but the kernel of hard SF which mostly emerges (quite pleasingly) at the end of the movie is subsumed by the complete stylization of the movie's visual elements. There really isn't any need for the aliens to all look and talk like Riff-Raff from 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show', for the scary, gruesome, dark sets - for the fact that people are driving 1960's cars around and wearing 1940's fashions. There is no need to have an evil little kid alien, or for the aliens to all chatter their teeth when they do something ominous. You have got get over the silliness of this sort of stuff and appreciate that it's just part of the weird, atmospheric world the director has created. Really it all owes as much to comic book horror and super-hero stuff as it does to traditional science fiction.
'Dark City' is the sort of film which can easily annoy you if you allow it to, but if you can forgive its affectations and the fact that it doesn't even attempt to explain various obvious logical oddities (e.g. why don't people who collapse face-first in a bowl of porridge drown after a few hours?) then the film can win you over as the hero goes through his version of taking the red pill (or was it the blue one? I always forget.)
This film also raises several important questions about Kiefer Sutherland. How come his glasses don't fall off when he's hanging upside down? Why does he speak haltingly, stutteringly, EXCEPT when he's stressed out? Did he just get this job because his dad knew the producer? Fortunately Sutherland's typically ridiculous acting is balanced to an extent by William Hurt as Inspector Bumstead (honestly!) - the cop who's chasing after the hero. Hurt is, as always, almost completely devoid of personality, and looks as if he's in a trance most of the time. Of course he's always like this, but in this movie it actually makes sense.
Rufus Sewell is fine as the hero - the guy who 'wakes up' - and so is Jennifer Connelly as his 'wife'. The aliens are all over the top and silly, and they float through the air and chatter their teeth, but like I said, you have to just think comic-book, and you can forgive it all.
In some ways 'Dark City' is a film that I hate myself for liking, but the truth is it's a pretty darn effective, if somewhat ridiculous SF story, and what makes it work are precisely the things that make it silly. Go figure. 7 out of 10.