Dark City [1998]

Year:	1998
Country:	USA
Language:	English
Genre:	Science Fiction, Film-Noir, Fantasy
IMDB:	IMDB Page
Rating:	7.3 Rate
Collection:	Seen It Wishlist
Community:	7 Have Seen


Director	Alex Proyas
Selected Cast	Rufus Sewell as John Murdoch
	William Hurt as Inspector Frank Burnstead
	Kiefer Sutherland as Dr Daniel P. Schreber
	Jennifer Connelly as Emma Murdoch
	Richard O'Brien as Mr. Hand

On DVD & Blu-ray World

DVD

Dark City [1998] - New Line Home Video - USA (1998)

DVD

Dark City [1998] - New Line Home Entertainment - USA (2008)

Blu-ray

Dark City [1998] - New Line Home Entertainment - USA (2008)

Blu-ray

Dark City [1998] - Reel - Australia (2008)

DVD

Dark City [1998] - Roadshow Entertainment - Australia (1998)

Images

Comments and Reviews


Magic Marmalade 🍰 ● 3rd Mar 2016		Review I'm not going to review the story here, but other aspects of this film have bugged me since it's release. This is a really interesting movie for film students, and a cautionary tale. In a nutshell, this is the very definition a potentially great movie stuck inside a mess. ...It could have been a ground-breaking film-noir sci-fi graphic novel style movie which people would speak of with reverence for decades as a benchmark for this style of movie. But instead, it does something to the viewer I've never actually experienced before: It is actually physically painful to watch it! And believe me, I've tried... as I wanted so much to like it. It was greatly anticipated by me and my friends when it came out at the cinema, for all it promised, but I recall us al feeling uneasy and let down when we came out of the cinema. I've tried to watch three times since, as I know there's a great film in there somewhere, and one of these times was to try and analyse exactly what it was that ruins it. And it can be boiled down to just one word: Editing. This is an object lesson in how not to edit a movie together... Having got a fantastic idea, great script, brilliant actors in the cast, sumptuous set design, and exceptional cinematography, why let a monkey edit the results? The reason it is so hard a watch, is because there is not two seconds together in the entire film where the camera rests on a single scene. Not one. I actually counted the seconds for each shot in one attempt... and no shot lasts longer than a second. The effect this creates on the viewer is in not letting the eye - and therefore, the mind - come to rest on what they are watching for a moment, it actually strains the eye over such a long period, and exhausts the concentration after only a few minutes. This really does give a genuine, physical headache, and eye-strain if you try to watch it all the way through. I can handle scenes or sequences which are a bit choppy, or quickly paced if that's what the story calls for, but here, it's every second, and for absolutely no reason. I think the reason may actually lie in the fact that the visuals are so impressive - the sets, effects etc. that someone made the odd decision to have many times more camera angles than were necessary. It must have been a forest of cameras on set when they were shooting it! And so each scene, even simple dialogue between two people, has a close up of each of their faces (from two or more distances and angles, a couple each of them together, and other assorted views and aspects... and they decided, having got all of these reams of footage (mileage is probably a better description), they had to use it all... or as much as they could cram into as short a space as possible. So maybe it's not the editor's fault exactly, but the pressure to use as much material as he/she could, in order to justify all of these tins of film being used. Somewhere there is a warehouse jammed full of cans of this raw material, from which you could probably re-cut the entire movie a hundred times over, and makes thousands of new versions of it.... ...I wish they would, as this metronomic nightmare torpedoes the entire film at a stroke. Just make one decent version, where occasionally the camera can come to rest on something, and not make the audience feel like they are being jabbed repeatedly, and relentlessly in the face with a stick, and let the thing breathe, then this will be all it can be. 5 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?

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Tags: Neo Noir

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