great style, mediocre movie

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2006)

Roger Ebert's pick for the best film of 1998, Dark City is not without merit, but ultimately is deficient in too many important respects for me to seriously entertain it as the best film of the year, particularly in a year that produced as many great films as 1998 did (Happiness, Shakespeare in Love, and Saving Private Ryan foremost among them). What the movie does have going for it is style. Careful attention is paid to maintaining the dark atmosphere without sacrificing beautiful textures and colors (unlike Tim Burton's Batman which failed in exactly this respect) and it contains many wonderful shots, particularly in the first ten minutes. The special effects team did a fine job with something we do not often see Â– architecture effects. The casting of Richard O'Brien (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Mr. Hand was inspired, but Kiefer Sutherland's acting, quite frankly, is bad. (That's just true in general, but it's particularly apparent in this role.) The dialogue has moments of hokiness, which would be bad enough in an old MGM musical, but in a modern thriller are positively unforgivable. If ever I should be abducted and brainwashed by a master race of telekinetic wizard aliens, my one hope is that they are not the sort of telekinetic wizard aliens who speak in puns. Proyas, the writer has chosen a interesting fact upon which to base the story, namely, that memories necessarily have a specific neurological underpinning, and it is therefore possible for people to have very clear memories of things that never, in fact, occurred. Thence he takes the story in an interesting direction. The plot is adequate, even good at times, and the film is mostly internally consistent in adhering to its sci-fi rules; but the creation of new memories is depicted as rather sloppy, and the fact that people are not implanted with the memories of daylight and/or how to get to Pebble Beach makes no sense within the context of the storyline. It can only be understood as a device to prevent the story from bogging down, and that is not the hallmark of a great film, and certainly not of the film of the year. It scooped The Matrix in its depiction of a lone human who can succeed in overthrowing a regime of tyrannical oppressors by virtue of his acquired omnipotence within their world. It is always interesting to see how restrained writers can be after granting their character the ability to do anything, literally anything, but our protagonist here, John Murdock, (unlike The Matrix's Neo or The Neverending Story's Bastian) is saved by not having to bear the writer's burden of his character's omnipotence through a sequel or two. For that we should all be thankful.