Dark City

Well, this was a visual spectacle I missed in the 90s. It’s an incredible cinematic triumph of setting and tone: there’s a quite fantastic neo-noir industrial style which reminds me a little of Jeunet and a little of Gilliam, but with a greater grandeur of scope. Plotwise, it’s not unlike a far more cerebral version of The Matrix (whose visual style it also resembles to some degree, and which it actually predates). I mostly liked what I saw. The cinematic technique, as the above description of setting and tone suggests, was fantastic, and the story design hit several of my sweet spots: I was thrown for a while by what appeared to be anachronisms, but keeping with the story rewarded persistence in explaining these oddities. There were aspects I didn’t like, mind — much like in The Matrix, there was a pretty explicit Messianic characteization which seemed a bit lazy, and Kiefer Sutherland’s peculiar, Shatneresque line delivery was, I’m sure, meant to convey some characterization, but mostly just annoyed me after the first few minutes.

However, these are quibbles and only very slight impediments to my wholehearted appreciation of this extraordinary film.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.