For a hot minute, it felt as if director Alex Proyas was destined to become the go-to guy for delivering instant cult classics drenched in darkness and Gothic sensibilities, with the filmmaker knocking out The Crow and Dark City back-to-back in the 1990s.
Things didn’t quite go to plan, with Proyas’ having helmed only two features in the last 13 years, with Nicolas Cage’s preposterous Knowing and the legendarily terrible Gods of Egypt not exactly setting the world alight. Dark City is still a severely underrated gem, though, and it must have been doing something right for Christopher Nolan to cite it as an influence on Inception.
That being said, a Reddit thread revisiting the pros and cons of the neo-noir science fiction psychological thriller has made it perfectly clear that everyone with a soft spot for Dark City still hates the exact same thing almost a quarter of a century on from its 1998 release, where it barely recouped the $27 million budget from theaters.
We are of course referring to the voiceover by Kiefer Sutherland’s Dr Daniel P. Schreber that was added in at the studio’s request, one that basically spoils the entire premise before audiences have had a chance to discover why exactly Rufus Sewell’s John Murdoch has woken up as a murder suspect, and who or what the mysterious Strangers have to do with it.
Thankfully, the needless introductory exposition was removed when the Director’s Cut arrived in 2008, and there’s a lot of people out there who won’t even contemplate the idea of revisiting the original version when an arguably superior one exists.
