Warning: Spoilers follow.
At the turn of the 21st century, there was a preponderance of films designed to mess with your head. It was the era of the twist ending, when movies made you question your reality and looked good doing it. Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Vanilla Sky. Strangely, Dark City is the one that got lost to history. Cinephiles and sci-fi fans worship it, probably in part because Roger Ebert did. He named it the best film of 1998 and even recorded a commentary track for the DVD. His championing of the film gave it a spotlight it desperately needed. Dark City made a meager (for those days) $27 million at the box-office and was nominated for exactly zero Oscars. It was Ebert who turned me on to Dark City. I read his books obsessively as a kid and tuned into his TV show whenever I could. So when he talked about this little sci-fi film as if it mattered, I listened.
Ebert was right. It’s one of the best twist-ending, reality-bending films of its era, and in a sense, it’s a Hall of Fame for the genre’s best tropes. The arc of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who wakes up in a strange city with no memory, tracks closely to The Matrix’s Neo; he’s a regular guy who discovers—spoiler—a secret race of aliens controlling his world, and over the course of the film learns that he alone has the power to defeat them. Also:
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