...its style more than makes up for any lack of substance.
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Not only is "Dark City" a good DVD transfer, it is a great-looking film in the first place. Most of the criticism directed toward its long-ago predecessor, "Metropolis," can be applied to the new film as well. "Dark City" seems a perfect example of style over substance, although its style more than makes up for any lack of substance. Almost everything in the movie is meant to make the viewer look at it closely, preferably again and again now that DVD makes that so easy, or to remind the viewer of something else in film history.
Its dark, futuristic city of the past is designed to evoke images of noir films of the forties and fifties and, naturally, of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; but I'll bet it conjures up even more recent memories for the majority of its younger viewers. It looks like bits and pieces of "Blade Runner," "Batman," "Hellraiser," "Phantasm," "Brazil," and director Alex Proyas's own previous film, "The Crow," with the added grimness of "Dune" thrown in for good measure.
What's more, its "Find Shell Beach" game is an entirely appropriate bonus item because "Dark City" itself is as close as any film has yet come to duplicating the experience of a big, first-person, video-adventure game. Watching "Dark City" is like playing "Doom" on a PC, or "Descent" or "Heretic" or "Duke Nukem" or "Quake" or any of a hundred other titles that all have a dark, labyrinth setting and require the player to puzzle out a usually-violent solution to an unidentified problem. Here, the plot of "Dark City" follows two threads: John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) searches the city maze trying to figure out who he is, and a police detective (William Hurt) searches the city for a serial killer, possibly John Murdoch.
Like most of the aforementioned video games, the snoop-and-shoot action of "Dark City" is fun for a while but can become wearisome with repetition for anyone but a devotee. The direction of the video game market has been toward redundancy, with more and more "Doom" clones looking better and more detailed but offering little advantage over their previous incarnations in terms of game play.
"Dark City" follows a similar pattern, offering more special effects and ever more bizarre events and characters (Kiefer Sutherland does a wonderful Peter Lorre mad-scientist turn), finally explaining too much in an ending overly reminiscent of "Return of the Jedi." Better to have left some things unexplained and let imagination do the rest.
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