Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

will-05196 Loved the idea and premise of this story.But the execution was pretty poor in most respects. The casting wasn't great - the lead for example, he's just not charismatic on screen, imo. They should have spent some money and got someone easier on the eye. This guy, he has a face which you could describe as "extremely punchable", there's something off-putting about him, am I the only one who thinks so?Sutherland was good as the whacky doctor, but the alien guys were really ridiculous, I felt. Their speech an mannerisms, their look. They look entirely human, which is a great way I'm sure to save money on costuming & makeup, but how about behind closed doors we see their true form?Really cool concept, not a bad plot, but not really a pleasing sensory experience, this movie.

bowmanblue It's hard to imagine the classic 1999 film 'The Matrix' starring Rufus Sewell in the lead, fighting an evil Agent played by a pasty bald Richard O'Brian. Yet, believe it or not, there is an 'early version' of the film that's just like that. 'Dark City' was released only one year earlier and it's basically the same premise, only it never achieved such greatness or Box Office success. But don't let that put you off.I love 'The Matrix.' It's very cool and you can't help but be wowed by the cyber-tech and, back then, the 'bullet-time' special effects were revolutionary for their day. Plus you had the highly-bankable Keanu Reeves in the lead and, no matter how wooden his performance, we all love to watch him. Therefore, 'The Matrix' just seemed to hit all the right notes at the right time (don't get me started on the sequels - that's a whole other story!). 'Dark City' didn't really have any of that. Rufus Sewell is a competent leading man, but you get the feeling that his part could have been played by any good looking guy, the same goes for his love interest Jennifer Connolly. It also doesn't have special effects that will make you think that you've never seen anything like that before. It's leads are competent, as are what effects the film utilises (nowadays I see a precursor to 'Inception' in there, too). It's dark (as the title suggests) and Gothic, portraying the film as a sombre and depressing affair, as opposed to 'The Matrix's' high-tech and uber-coolness. Therefore, 'Dark City' doesn't look or sound like anything that original. However, if you don't dwell on any of that (or just haven't seen 'The Matrix' - there must be a couple of you out there!) then this is really something pretty special.Yes, the film is quite (and I hate to keep using this word, but there really isn't any other that sums it up) 'dark.' It is certainly not a 'feel-good' film, but where it really succeeds is its sheer concept. Rufus Sewell wakes up in a flat with no memory of who he is. The only thing he knows is that there's a dead body in the apartment and it looks very much like he's the killer. Therefore, he sets out to find out who he is and whether he did it. Now, along the way he discovers that it's not just him who has a dark (there's that word again) past, but also his whole world. And that brings me nicely on to the baddies of the film - the 'Strangers.' Instead of 'The Matrix's' 'agents' you have a horde of black-trenchcoat-clad bald men with pasty faces hell-bent on thwarting our hero's efforts at every turn. And they really are great. Whether it's the fact that they refer to each other by weird noun-like names, i.e. 'Mr Hand' and 'Mr Foot,' or its' because they have one little boy-version of themselves who is just downright creepy (and don't get me started on their 'powers'). All in all, they're some of the best movie-villains ever created.If you like your sci-fi 'action-packed' and full of explosions and battles then you probably won't really enjoy this. I love it, but I don't watch it often - that's because you really need to be in the mood to sit down and watch quite a thoughtful film that really gets under your skin. There are some small fist-fights and superpowered skirmishes just in case you're wondering and I'm glad it seems that this film has found its own place in the world with a dedicated cult following. However, it will always be overshadowed by 'The Matrix,' but I believe that 'Dark City' is different and special enough to warrant its own place in your collection alongside Keanu trilogy.

Eli Quiroga I made the mistake in watching this movie because of the high rating, which is a mistake I may never make again. As the movie began I thought that the writing was supposed to be ironic, like it was being overly cliché on purpose as a joke, but then as the movie continued I slowly began to realize how uncreative the characters and dialogue were. Were there any jokes at all in this film? because the only thing you caught me laughing about was how predictable and banal the story line was.The characters were also bland, which could have been somewhat excusable considering the theme of erasing people's memories and personality, but this never even happened to any of our main characters. The main characters were completely immune to the main plot of the film and were still inexcusably shallow. The main character, the human with the same powers as the aliens, is supposed to be a human who is apparently "more evolved" and thus closer to the alien species, and this is how he has powers. It really makes no sense in general, but it also raises a lot of questions like why nobody seemed to notice his abilities until he was an adult who got abducted by aliens and lived multiple lives until finally he notices that he has incredible power during another one of many memory implant procedures.The obvious bad guys were both uncreative, self-contradictory and unrealistic. The "aliens" were, a bunch of screeching, cold-hearted (and yet still irrational), pale- skin, long-black-coat-wearing humans. They have powerful telekinetic abilities, but this didn't stop them from behaving like your typical slow-chasing, inefficient, knife-wielding villain. For a supposedly collective species, they sure were awful at working together and coordinating with each other. For an incredibly technologically advanced species, they sure were primitive in their philosophy and even naive in their science. For an alien species, they sure were anthropomorphic, both physically and behaviorally. For experimenters, they sure were willing to ruin their experiments and to be needlessly cruel to their valuable test subjects. There seemed to be no real method to their madness either. It was as if they expected that replacing people's memories every midnight would somehow one day give them a great insight but they had nothing that resembled a scientific method. Why this would be the way that the aliens chose to study humans is beyond me. Also beyond me is why they would go to such great costly lengths for such small returns.To top it all off, the entire story makes absolutely no sense; The very concept that the movie attempts to get at is completely contradicted by the ending of the movie. The idea is supposed to be that humans have "souls", that we are more than just our memories. John tells an alien that "what makes us human" won't be found in the brain and that the person whose memories he was implanted with "was never him". What does John then proceed to do with his power? He acts out the wishes of the person whose memories he was implanted with. What made him who he was, in the end, was nothing more than those memories. When he is free to do anything, to be "himself", he still reenacts the implanted memories by creating the beach and by meeting his fake wife. His wife and everyone else are then implied to behave exactly as how they were supposed to, rather than how they would "freely" want to act according to their "soul". The movie is an absolute mess that got nothing right.

Amr Saleh Ali what if one can simply free himself from his past and his own memories, what if you can conquer the power of time that contain everything within its existence, and what if you uncovered the truth behind the humans identity away from the imprinted destiny that fate draw for them..this movie has discussed all those ideas and moreafter he found out about his wife affair John Murdoch has to experimented the truth about not only his feeling for her but the truth about the struggle of all mankind against the power of their destiny and how he would behave and react to what happen through his quest will open the door for his freedom as a human and give him the ability to control the universe and reshaped his life and everything else