...last night, one of us went off...

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2000)

Yahoo! I finally own this movie, and I just gave up two hours of precious Internet time to watch it again! I have not read any of the other reviews yet, nor do I care what they say (as I have a feeling a lot of them must be negative). Something about "Dark City GRABBED me in the very first scene and wouldn't let go until the very last one. I was indignant that it won no awards the year it came out, and the entire time I was watching "The Matrix" (which I HATED, but that's another review entirely) I was driving everyone around me crazy with my constant indignant outbursts of "Oh, this is SUCH a rip-off of "Dark City!"
In all seriousness, this is an amazing piece of work. The mood, the mysteriousness, Sewell's intense yet lost character, Hurt's deadpan "detective...for now," Richard O'Brien actually being creepier than usual as a drone revelling in the borrowed mind of a psychopath...my only complaint is that Connelly's nightclub singer was perhaps a bit TOO jaded, to the point of looking half asleep most of the time, but as I've been fond of the lovely lady since "Labyrinth" I'll gladly forgive her. :) I even enjoyed Sutherland's disjointed "psychiatrist with (literally) nothing left but science and a spark of hope" -- he annoyed everyone else I know who watched this movie, but I UNDERSTOOD him, I really did, so I thought his performance was wonderful.
(What I also thought was interesting was how the entire movie was shot inthe same murky yellow-and-black ambiance as director Proya's other great work "The Crow." If you didn't notice, watch it again and see...)
In parting: the scene where Sewell's character Murdoch displays his newfound power by simply calmly *stepping* out of a trap as if it longer existed was ten times more powerful than ANY gaudy explosion in The Matrix. And I'll stand by that.