Dark City (1998)

I don't think I've ever seen a movie so influenced by German expressionism made outside of the Weimar Republic. There's Nosferatu here, M, Metropolis, and even some of Fritz Lang's later American Noir's. The films one of those, I suppose you'd call them allegories, where man is manipulated by outside forces and his world is an illusion, like in The Matrix or the 13th Floor. Those kind of films have never fully worked for me, and even with Roger Ebert explaining things to me in his (surprisingly present) audio commentary, like why so many of the characters acting seems wooden at first, I'm still left distant by this film. I'm glade I finally saw it just to get a sense of what its about, and I appreciate the visual sense, but I really didn't much care for it. Let's say 2 out of 5. Maybe it will grow on me as time goes by, a lot of the DVD's special features seem insistent on treating the film as a classic not yet fully understood or appreciated.