YMMV / Dark City (1998)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: John and Emma feel like they're in love, despite the memories imprinted in them by the Strangers, and The Power of Love allows John to break the glass in the prison just to kiss Emma. One has to wonder, were they lovers before the Strangers wiped them? At the end, Emma's new persona Anna seems to have an interest in John immediately after meeting him, but then again Emma remembers feeling like she didn't know John when she first saw him at the apartment. Are their feelings just something resulting from the Strangers imprinting them?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Many viewers might not realize that the automat was a real type of dining establishment popular around the middle of The 20th Century. They are quite common in the Netherlands, and a few are still in operation elsewhere.
• Award Snub: The lack of a Best Picture Academy Award nomination is understandable thanks to the Sci Fi Ghetto, but no nominations for Art Direction, Visual Effects, or Makeup Design is near-obscene.
• Awesome Music:
  • The entire soundtrack. It's as if Trevor Jones managed to put the epicness of sci-fi, the intrigue of noir, the sadness of drama and the creepiness of horror in one score. Special mention must go to "Memories Of Shell Beach".
  • Bonus points go to Emma Murdoch's performances of "Sway" and "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes". Turns out Jennifer Connelly makes an excellent chanteuse. Her voice is dubbed in the theatrical release but her real one is heard in the director's cut - and it's still quite pleasant.
• Complete Monster (1992 script): The Mystery Men's leader, "Mr. Black", controls humanity by regularly having them "tuned" to rewrite their personalities and memories according to his wishes. When protagonist John White is awakened during his tuning to be remade into a Serial Killer, Black has the Mystery Men horribly murder White's intended victims—including a baby—to frame him, and drives an investigating inspector insane through sheer agony. Slowly skinning his own reluctant human scientist alive for betraying him, Black revives the corpses of the humans he killed to accuse White of murdering them and when White refuses to break, simply overpowers him in a psychic battle before tuning White with the monstrous personality.
• Critical Dissonance: While the film received generally positive reviews, it didn't manage to win audiences, and didn't do well commercially. It took a combination of an extremely positive review from Roger Ebert and home releases for audiences to finally appreciate it.
• Cult Classic: It bombed at the box office and got a fairly average critical reception upon release but has since developed a growing fanbase who love it for its original story and amazing visuals among other qualities, leading it to be widely seen as an underappreciated classic of the sci-fi genre.
• Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Mr. Wall, for being an interesting combination of The Brute and the Only Sane Man, all rolled into one Faux Affably Evil package.
  • Detective Walenski, for his intriguing and amusing The Cuckoolander Was Right dialogue and accomplishments. It can be amazing to realize he has less than five minutes of screen time.
  • Single Mom Stripper May makes the most of her two or three scenes.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The Strangers are thwarted and Dark City is brought into the sun again in the hands of a benevolent ruler. But they're still trapped on a city-sized planet with no knowledge of how to return to Earth. And just imagine the shock and upheaval when the population discovers that their whole lives and their entire world are just lies. How is John going to create a society from that foundation? Will he be corrupted by his absolute power over reality? What happens if and when he dies?
• He Really Can Act: Richard O'Brien manages to utilize his campiness to exceptionally creepy effect as Mr Hand.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The image of Emma or Anna now standing on the end of a pier, since Jennifer Connelly would coincidentally recreate that same shot in two more movies. First in Requiem for a Dream and then in House of Sand and Fog.
  • Rufus Sewell begins the movie separated from his wife because she had an affair - and you're not sure if he's the bad guy. This is pretty funny considering his roles as the other man in a love triangle in both A Knight's Tale and The Illusionist (2006).
  • The fact that the film's 1940s setting is just a construction almost seems like a response to the amount of times Jennifer Connelly had starred in movies set in that era - The Rocketeer, Mulholland Falls, The Hot Spot and Inventing The Abbotts.
  • In addition, this was not the first film in which Connelly is inside a maze where reality can get mixed around some.
  • All the streets are avenues followed by a letter of the alphabet. It's a good thing we never saw Avenue Q.
  • Jennifer Connelly would star as Betty Ross in 2003's Hulk, and William Hurt would star as Betty's father, Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe starting with 2008's The Incredible Hulk (2008).
• Improved By The Recut: The Director's Cut removes the Spoiler Opening and allows Jennifer Connelly's singing voice to be heard. It also restores an extended version of a scene where Emma finds May's surviving daughter, who's drawn a picture of the Strangers, further clueing her and Bumstead in that something isn't right.
• Iron Woobie: Tortured Dr. Schreber's comeuppance against his captors with his "how to kill Tune like a mofo" memory syringe.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Some people watch it just for the stunning visuals.
  • Even though Jennifer Connelly is just in a supporting role (admittedly an important one), a lot of people watch the movie for her.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The Stranger known as "Mr. Hand" is the most brilliant and creative of his kind. The leader of the group tracking John Murdoch, Hand knowingly injects himself with memories fatal to his kind to understand Murdoch's thought process. Able to predict Murdoch's moves with his heightened understanding of human emotion, Hand even exploits Murdoch's love for his supposed wife to cause him to surrender. Nearly guaranteeing the continued existence of his race by bringing Murdoch to be made to join them, even after Murdoch resists and wipes out the other Strangers, Hand gracefully recalls his enjoyment of experiencing human memories before accepting his fate.
  • Dr. Daniel P. Schreber was taken by the Strangers and forced to erase his own memories to leave nothing but his scientific mind to serve their memory experiments. When he becomes aware of Murdoch's awakening, Schreber guides him in an attempt to liberate the city from the Strangers. Manipulating his erstwhile master into injecting Murdoch with memories of Schreber teaching him psychic "tuning" through a lifetime under the guise of merging him with the Strangers' own genotype, Schreber allows John to overpower them in the final battle for the city.
• Memetic Mutation: "SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN FOREVER!"
• Older Than They Think:
  • Dark City explored the themes of a mutable reality controlled by otherworldly forces a year before The Matrix. By strange coincidence, the two films were also shot at the same studio, and the Wachowskis re-used some of the Dark City sets (specifically the big spiral staircase and the rooftops used for Trinity's run). Taking things full-circle, the Shinichiro Watanabe short in the Animatrix has a Hero Antagonist Private Detective pursuing Trinity and realizing the terrible truth about his world. This is rather similar to Bumstead's role in Dark City.
  • Inception would also feature dreamscape cities that morph from will alone and have a plot about manipulating someone's memories in some way.
• One-Scene Wonder: Mr Book appears far less than you'd actually realise - only getting lines of exposition until the climax. But he feels like a developed character and makes his presence known.
• Paranoia Fuel: One-ups even The Matrix's Platonic Cave. The world you live in isn't a lie, your life and memories down to your own entire personality are a lie, built to order mere minutes ago.
• Questionable Casting: Kiefer Sutherland is thought to be the weak link in the film, going heavily against type to play a mild-mannered psychiatrist. One reviewer noted that making Dr Schreber Mr. Exposition clashed badly with Kiefer's choice to give the doctor a lisp.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Rufus Sewell before his more remembered roles in A Knight's Tale, The Holiday and The Illusionist.
  • Melissa George has a small role as a prostitute, in her first American film.
  • David Wenham also has a small role as one of the Strangers.
• Shocking Moments: Several moments. But special mention must be made of the film's climax, where the visual effects really go off the rails in the most spectacular way.
• Special Effect Failure: The miniatures are woefully out of scale and poorly executed compared to the CG.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Single Mom Stripper May and Defective Detective Walenski are both interesting characters who could have been good supporting protagonists, but each of them only has a couple of scenes.
  • The Strangers are shown to have children, but how they reproduce or how their children feel about the experiment is never examined. They also never get to interact with the human children, such as May's daughter.
• Vindicated by History: It didn't make a lot of money, audiences generally ignored it, and even most critics at the time thought that it was merely good, mainly praising the spellbinding visuals but finding the story to be average. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, absolutely adored it! He gave it 4 stars in his initial review, declared it the best film of 1998, compared it to Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey, put it in his "Great Movies" collection (that's alongside The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Citizen Kane!) only 7 years after it was released, gave a glowing audio commentary on the DVD release, and used it frequently in his film teachings. Lucky for the film, Ebert was one of the most famous critics in the world, and his word-of-mouth was quite enough to earn it some re-evaluation. Christopher Nolan citing this as an influence on Inception further redirected goodwill towards it.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Alex Proyas always keeps the screen alive with some truly jaw dropping imagery that rivals Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott firing on all cylinders. Especially the amazing scene in which the buildings start changing before our eyes.

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