Rent Dark City (1998)

Matrix Pre-loaded - Dark City review by CP Customer

Excellent performances from the cast make this an eeiree film full of twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat.

The story of a higher force controlling our lives is obviously a familiar one thanks to the Matrix but this film was out the year before the Matrix and this is a far darker version of a chilling story.

A film-stealing performance from Keifer Sutherland

A Genre Classic - Dark City review by CP Customer

The year before The Matrix was released and its sizeable influence since, I had the pleasure of seeing Dark City in the local cinema. Despite sinking without a trace, I'm pleased that many of us who did see the film, remembered the unique imagination it showed. So the opportunity to pick up the film in blu ray was too good to miss. This world is far from what it seems and those who live out their days on the surface are unaware of the real purpose of their existance. A very dark, gritty science fiction film that deserves your attention. Perhaps Kiefer Sutherland's best performance in a movie to date and Jennifer Connelly in an early role. It really has everything and this blu ray edition contains the theatrical and director versions, both very different. Much of the extra content concerns the issues bringing the film to the big screen and being given the go ahead. While other critics reflect on why it was overlooked, when clearly it deserved better.

Noir in a Blender, Mood in a Bottle - Dark City review by griggs

It feels like someone nicked a load of noir and expressionist visuals, stuck them in a blender with sci-fi paranoia, and poured the result into a city that never gets daylight. Wet streets, hard shadows, looming buildings — the mood does a lot of heavy lifting, and it pulls you in.

Rufus Sewell is a solid anchor: confused, stubborn, and just determined enough to keep moving when the world keeps rewriting itself. Kiefer Sutherland has that wired, slightly haunted urgency, Jennifer Connelly brings the closest thing the film has to warmth, and Richard O’Brien is wonderfully unsettling — like the nicest person you’ve ever met who also definitely knows where you live.

The pacing, though, can be a bit stop-start. It sprints, pauses to explain, then sprints again, and the middle stretch starts to feel more like a schematic than a story. Still, Dark City is a classy oddball, and you can see its fingerprints all over later sci-fi noir. I liked it more as a mood than as a ride — but it’s a mood worth revisiting.