Dark City

I thought Dark City presented some interesting original ideas; the concept of a world that is completely reconstructed nightly to serve as a living experiment on a municipal scale. The idea that a race of superior intellect could be envious of our emotions and individuality to the point where they would devote their existence to the study of our kind - it seems almost self centered of us to often postulate in our literature that we are the centre of some grand scheme. It also plays to our paranoid fascinations of being surveilled or manipulated by some higher authority. There where also psychological thriller elements in the manipulation of memories - somewhat reminiscent of the concepts in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though on a less personal scale. 

The costumes and sets were generally very rich. The tuning mechanism and the outfits of the tuners have likely influenced much of the genre's art to this day; I see similarities in the cloaks with the Theron guards in the Gears of War series, for example.

Despite the richness in costume and environments, some of the richness of the world fell flat on a couple levels to me. Could these people really forget about the outside world? Is there no world news or media? I guess in our age of internet and instant global connectivity, interacting only with others inside of one single city seems absurd. How could these people not notice they are in an isolated system and not part of planet earth? In comparable films such as The Matrix, the illusion is complete - the experimental space or virtual space is as large as the physical space that we would understand earth to be. Not so in Dark City - this made it feel like more of a fantasy than something that could be real. I think that element of believably in The Matrix helped make it a bigger success.