Dark City
1998 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Alex Proyas
A man struggles with memories of his past, including a wife he cannot remember, in a nightmarish world with no sun and run by beings with telekinetic powers who seek the souls of humans.
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75 comments on Hacker News
The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
The automat is something of a strange echo from my childhood.
When I was maybe 5 or so, my mom took my sister and I to Chicago from Kansas City. That train ride in and of itself is something of time capsule in my memory. My sister remembered the glowing handrails (radium?). I remember the lounge car where passengers sipped cocktails and watched the lights at night rush past outside. The women dressing, in my fuzzy recollection, like extras in The Thin Man.
Chicago was where I got to buy a pie, or some kind of dessert, from an automat. What a magical thing to give a kid some coins and just tell them to go grab what they like…
There are a number of things from my childhood that I came to find later were just gone. (Or obscure now to the point they are essentially gone.) Imagine my delight when the film Dark City featured an automat.
I was surprised in Tokyo to find something of a hybrid. Those places where you place your order, pay through something like a vending machine at the entrance of the place. The order goes back to the kitchen and, after you've sat down and waited a short time, your order is up.
Struck me as an efficient way to not have to have someone running a cash register, seating you, taking your order.
Also, there's a documentary called "The Automat" [1] that I tracked down just recently—have not yet watched. (Looks like it's streaming on Amazon, FWIW.)
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4554690/
>about what the Mozilla Corporation is currently doing.
I don't know if you ever saw the movie Dark City, but one aspect of the plot was that everyone thought they knew the way to Shell Beach, but could never actually tell you how to get there if you asked [0]:
>Murdoch learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which everyone knows, though no one remembers how to get there and Murdoch's attempts to visit fail.
And, look at this thread! 90% of the time it's young adults with no financial literacy misinterpreting non-profit filings.
Which, again, it's not to say there's no issues. Adtech is bad. CEO pay is bad-ish. But most of the time the best anyone can manage is sweet nothings like "you know... all the... stuff they're doing!" It's filed away in the Shell Beach part of their brains.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)
Speaking of Drake equations, you should (1) see the other comment here with this account name (2) check out the top Pirate Bay rip of Dark City (which predated that other movie) and turn on the English subtitles and count the number of times the characters look at or make gestures pointing to certain alignments of the text in the subtitles and, if you're true "hackers", try to figure out the encrypted messages in the text alignments that the characters are looking at/pointing to at key moments – and then when/if you figure out what the encrypted messages mean, try to figure out how the director worked together backwards so that they could have a script that aligns a certain way using subtitles and then make the scenes so that the actors are looking/pointing to key spots at just the right time.
If you appreciate technical things, you'd be in for a treat.
I'll just pop in here to mention another fantastic and curiously similar film that came out around the same time, but was completely overshadowed by The Matrix.
Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
> When asked to explain rationales, these LLMs are observed to lie frequently.
It's not that they "lie" they can't know. LLM lives in the movie Dark City, some frozen mind formed from other peoples (written) memories. :P The LLM doesn't know itself, it's never even seen itself.
At best it can do is cook up retroactive justifications like you might cook up for the actions of a third party. It can be fun to demonstrate, edit the LLMs own chat output to make it say something dumb and ask why it did and watch it gaslight you. My favorite is when it says it was making a joke to tell if I was paying attention. It certainly won't say "because you edited my output".
Because of the internal complexity, I can't say that what an LLM does and its justifications are entirely uncorrelated. But they're not far from uncorrelated.
The cool thing you can do with an LLM is probe them with counterfactuals. You can't rerun the exact same interview without the garlic breath. That's kind cool, also probably a huge liability since it may well be for any close comparison there is a series of innocuous changes that flip it, even ones suggesting exclusion over protected reasons.
Seems like litigation bait to me, even if we assume the LLM worked extremely fairly and accurately.
> It's funny how movies from the same rough period seem to be all similar underneath.
The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, eXistenZ... there was definitely something in the air at the close of the 90s.
Wow, I wonder if this was part of Alex Proya's inspiration for the setting and vibe of the 1998 film Dark City..
Dark City was a famous budgeting disaster because it spent way too much on sets and went rather over-budget, then did the terrible thing of not making that much money in the box office. The Matrix was able to spend so much of its budget on effects and effects innovation precisely because it got handed so many of Dark City's way too expensive sets trying to recoup some of the costs of Dark City.
They are definitely related, and I also think Dark City was the better version of Matrix 1 on a storytelling and aesthetics level, Matrix's innovative effects aside, but then I like all of the Matrix sequels a lot more than I like the first Matrix film.
and Dark City was its name?
On a serious not The Matrix was a fine film with fantastic effects but on a scale of Punch & Depth per $ spent on production Dark City delivered more bang per buck.
Asking people what did "Mozilla do wrong?" is kind of like asking "How do I get to Shell Beach" in the movie Dark City, with similar results.
People say "all the stuff going on with Mozilla" like there's a list of real things that really happened when it's upwards of 90% smoke and vibes. And this is coming from someone who thinks the recent subtraction of language about not selling your data actually was a bad move and rather damning.
But it's a real thing in a long line of nothingburgers, and it's amazing once the comment gets to the part where it's supposed to make a specific charge and instead it's just "all the things going on".
Didn't expect Dark City to be mentioned in the Christmas thread. Great movie, indeed. Dark, mysterious and thought provoking.
Dark City released in February, 1998. Great movie, though.
I refer to dark city all the time when creating AI agents, when Kiefer would inject them with particular memories when the city stood still. And Shell Beach pops into my mind when I take the train to the former grandios Coney Island.
Existenz was another unique underappreciated movie of that year and whose theme never got picked by any other movie. When Jude Law realizes that the Chinese food he is eating can be put together to assemble the gun my mind was blown.
And Dark City was delayed after it was finished, it should have come out before The Matrix. I copy here my previous HN comment from June 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36415981
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I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.
Here is Dark City’s director Alex Proyas: “Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytxjsetVIRM
And this is a juxtaposition of some scenes with background music: “The Matrix vs. Dark City.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moW17YHl6B8
This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:
> It was a very groovy movie, you see?
> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrK4U6PEu94&t=1029s
Nobody even knows about Dark City which came out the same year. Because the freaking Matrix came out too. That's just how many good films there were that year. If Dark City came out today it would be lauded as most original thing in a decade.
It goes on my list of 'dreamlike' movies, they don't always fully add up consciously but you can feel your unconscious going into overdrive while watching them (or maybe there is a surface plot that mostly adds up, like EWS, but there is clearly something going on at a least one other level). The viewing experience is often downright hypnotic for me.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
This is cool. I don't watch so many movies anymore, so there must be many good ones i've missed. Is there a functioning natural language query somewhere?
"I want to watch a science fiction movie that is not a super hero movie. Movies I love are Dark City and Daybreakers. Prioritize movies of short length, nothing more than 2h30. Filter out movies I've already rated, here's my Watchlist"
Well adding to the above list of what could be considered stand out movies, these below are some I really enjoyed / admired -- in no particular order.
Dark City
Ice Planet (2001)
The Green Mile
Mortadelo & Filemon: The Big Adventure
Flodder 3
Gettin' Square
Midnight Run
The Accountant
Slipstream (2005)
To Kill a Mockingbird
North by Northwest
In the Heat of the Night
What the Deaf Man Heard
The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn
Short film - Forklift Driver Klaus – The First Day on the Job
> That terrible Lost in Space movie
I'll never defend "Lost in Space" as a cinematic tour-de-force in the traditional sense but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most quintessentially-90s films ever made. It has Silicon Graphics logos and bubble-shaped silver electronics everywhere. William Hurt managed to find time to slip away from the "Dark City" set to make an appearance. Pre-Felicity Shagwell/post-Rollergirl Heather Graham fends off advances from Joey Tribbiani while the crazy guy from "Leon: The Professional" makes a bunch of bizarre wisecracking non-sequiturs. A brash Big beat remix of the original TV theme blares over the credits immediately following a fight involving a giant CGI (SGI?) spider.
I disliked it intensely as a kid but enjoy it a lot in retrospect because of my high-resolution nostalgia goggles.
This reminds me of Dark City: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
'The City of the Lost Children' and 'Dark City' were movies that made a deep impression on me when they came out, and so I watch them regularly still to this day.
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
No, the whole reason "Director's Cuts" exists is that those represent the cut the director wanted, not the theatrical cut released by the studio (which is driven by the studio's or producer's wants).
See, for example, Alien 3, Blade Runner, and Justice League for the most notorious/well-known examples. Lesser known examples include Aliens, The Abyss, Kingdom of Heaven, Doctor Sleep, Lethal Weapon, Dark City.
Only a handful of directors at the big studios get the right to control the final cut. You'll notice the director responsible for 3 of the 4 highest-grossing movies of all time has 2 movies in that list; this is because James Cameron didn't earn the right to control final cut until after his 3rd blockbuster success.
A few studios, like Netflix and A24, adhere to the "auteur's theory" of filmmaking, and let the director have full control over the creative process of the film, including the final cut, even without an established record of hits, but this is the exception, not the norm.
Dark City (1998), Alex Proyas. This is an unmarketable movie. I consider knowing its genre to be a spoiler. It is one of those movies where the less you know about it, the better you're viewing experience. If you watch it you must watch the Directors Cut as the theatrical release was dumbed down by the studio execs.
The movie Dark City (1998) explores this concept somewhat.
It's still fascinating how much Dark City spent on sets, how poorly it did in the box office, and how quickly WB let The Matrix team ransack the sets. One of the factors in The Matrix's huge success at the time was that it was relatively cheap because of that leg up. It's one of the biggest visual differences between the first film and the sequels: the first film started from and benefited from Dark City's unique set design. (It's another thing I think makes the sequels better as movies because there was less aesthetic clash when the teams had full control of the sets and weren't just reusing/abusing great sets from a different team with an entirely different aesthetic design.)
> I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich [...] somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor.
There were a lot of "are you living in a simulation?" film and television episodes that came out in 1998-2000. The Matrix was obviously the most successful, but Dark City (over a year earlier) had a similar theme. The X-Files episode "Field Trip" aired a few weeks after eXistenZ was in theatres, but a few weeks before The Thirteenth Floor was released. Etc.
I'm a fan of the genre, and I like all of the examples I've seen from that period (eXistenZ in particular), but I remember feeling at the time like it was just too much similar material in too short a period of time. I doubt Sony could have done anything to significantly change the box office numbers other than releasing it well before The Matrix.
On the movie side, I'd suggest "Dark City", the 1998 neo-noir sci-fi film directed by Alex Proyas (more famous for The Crow). Not sure why it isn't more widely known - I think in some ways it got overshadowed by The Matrix which was released not long afterwards but I like it a lot.
There were several movies with a similar theme that came out around this time. The 13th Floor is another good one, although Dark City and Matrix were better IMO. I think the backdrop of the Internet really taking off sort of had everyone thinking about worlds within worlds more than they were before.
Thanks for the links. Wow didn't realize there was a producer in common between the two films. Stinks that Dark City didn't get enough credit at the time.
I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.
Here is Dark City’s director Alex Proyas: “Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytxjsetVIRM
An this is a juxtaposition of some scenes with background music: “The Matrix vs. Dark City.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moW17YHl6B8
I second the recommendation on Dark City.
When I first saw The Matrix I said to myself, they stole all the ideas in this film from Dark City.
I feel the need to mention Dark City (1998)[0] here. It's like a noir sci fi truman show.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
"2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a much more accessible movie that holds up pretty well. It also feels like a payoff after investing so much time being confused/bored by 2001.
I was 11 when "Logan's Run" came out. Yes it's kinda loaded with 70's sex tropes for the first act, but it's also equal parts goofy and a really good film.
The original "The Day The Earth Stood Still" holds up.
"A Boy and His Dog" is a bit crude here and there, but might resonate with a 12yo.
"Quatermass and the Pit" (aka "Five Million Years to Earth") is both intense and fairly tame.
A lot of old TV series hold up - Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, UFO, Space 1999, Star Trek TOS, etc all have some excellent episodes.
I absolutely love "Dark City" and "12 Monkeys" but I'm not sure they'd have held my interest at 12.
Doctor Who, both old and new are excellent. Though I'm partial to the Tom Baker era.
The Stargate franchise is pretty good.
"Moon" (2009) is a bit cerebral but a good SF story.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
You definitely need to watch Dark City (if you haven't already!)
The movie does a variation on this exact plot. Very well, even.
Dark City is one of my favorite movies.
And for the love of god, watch the directors cut of `Dark City`, not the cinema version.
Despite Gattaca being one of my favorite movies for years I only recently learned, right here on HN, that the cinematographer is Sławomir Idziak, frequent collaborator of Krzysztof Kieślowski, which explains why Gattaca looks so much like one of my other favorites, The Double Life of Veronique.
> create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.
See also: Dark City
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
From the Wikipedia entry:
"A director's cut of Dark City was officially released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on 29 July 2008. The director's cut removes the opening narration, which Proyas felt explained too much of the plot, and includes approximately eleven minutes of additional footage, most of which extends scenes already present in the theatrical release with additional establishing shots and dialogue."
I originally saw the director's cut, then went back and watched a video with the opening narration. I felt that my viewing of the movie was improved having seen it originally without.
>Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false.
I'll add that if you haven't seen Dark City and are going to watch it, you must seek out the director's cut. The theatrical cut basically ruins the plot up front assuming the audience won't get it and it changes the film dramatically.
Gattaca is a good movie. I can't wait to read this. I'd also suggest William Gibson (of neuromancer fame)'s Alien script.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread. Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false. I haven't watched this movie in years, but it's been permanently seared into the deepest darkest corners of my mind.
Another excellent sci-fi i came across earlier this year, from the late 70's early 80's is a polish film On The Silver Globe. The special effects are nothing more than lighting, photography, writing, costumes, set design, and excellent acting, but I can still say that it's psychadelic in the way it provokes the mind, the senses, and the emotions.
Looooove Dark City!
But let’s not forget the movie that was right after The Matrix but also much better: Equilibrium
I recently rewatched the first Matrix movie and came to the conclusion that it is as well crap, when compared to Dark City.
Yes yes!! these are two of my favourite all time movies. Kiefer Sutherland acting in Dark City is amazing. Those are two movies I can re-watch several times without getting tired of them.
Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are a few of my top sci-fi movies of all time. Both have themes that echo the Matrix, but done in a much more subtle and thought provoking way IMHO.
It's a shame The Thirteenth Floor came out the same year as the Matrix...
> Total Recall
and all the Verhoeven movies 1985-1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Verhoeven
Not based on P.K. Dick works but heavily (and beatifully) inspired by them I'd also mention "Dark City" directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, I Robot)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)
Here's a list I stole from Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-films-have-the-lowest-average-shot-length-ASL
ASL 1.55 - Doomsday (2008) : 4052 shots over 105 minutes
ASL 1.72 - Transporter 3 (2008) : 3360 shots over 96 minutes
ASL 1.73 - Domino (2005) : 4046 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 1.83 - Quantum of Solace (2008) : 3198 shots over 98 minutes
ASL 1.84 - Crank: High Voltage (2009) : 2718 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 1.92 - Transporter 2 (2005) : 2524 shots over 81 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Band of Ninja (1967) : 3424 shots over 114 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Moulin Rouge! (2001) : 3594 shots over 120 minutes
ASL 2.03 - Gamer (2009) : 2502 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 2.03 - The 6th Day (2000) : 3418 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 2.08 - Hot Fuzz (2007) : 3304 shots over 115 minutes
ASL 2.10 - Dark City (1998) : 2982 shots over 104 minutes
ASL 2.15 - Armageddon (1998) : 4025 shots over 145 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Transporter (2002) : 2420 shots over 87 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) : 2910 shots over 105 minutes
I think the '90s had a bit more variety than the '10s and (for now) '20s. E.g. we seem to have lost good legal procedurals, thrillers, weird fiction, and "small scale" sci-fi.
Fo example, what are the'10s equivalents of "A Few Good Men", "Seven", "Dark City" and "The 13th Floor"?
There is _some_ stuff, but less than before, replaced by a massive amount of super hero movies or long-running franchises.
As a support clue, I invite you to consider the winners of the MTV Movie Awards, which are more "popular" than other Awards:
92 Terminator 2: Judgment Day 93 A Few Good Men 94 Menace II Society 95 Pulp Fiction 96 Seven 97 Scream 98 Titanic 99 There's Something About Mary 00 The Matrix (bonus: not 90s)
compare with the 10s
10 The Twilight Saga: New Moon 11 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse 12 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 13 Marvel's The Avengers 14 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire 15 The Fault In Our Stars 16 Star Wars: The Force Awakens 17 Beauty and the Beast 18 Black Panther 19 Avengers: Endgame
I have the feeling most "risky" movies, for lack of a better word, have moved to streaming services.
Ebert did a commentary track on the DVD of Dark City that could be used to teach film school. Absolutely illuminating.
That probably shows just how dark and muddy things have become! The Matrix is very dark, mostly taking place at night or in dark, artificially lit rooms. A lot of it is almost monochromatic. This seems to mostly for stylish effect. As you say, the monochrome is used to distinguish Matrix from real world.
Two other very dark films at around the same time: Dark City and Fight Club. Dark City is dark because it's night time, but it doesn't appear to be desaturated. Fight Club is intentionally underexposed for the whole film for stylistic effect.
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
Yeah, that intro to Dark City was a crime against the audience. And honestly I think it was really shortsighted/cowardly of the studio. If you look at two movies that came just a year later, The Matrix and Sixth Sense, a big surprise reveal was central to both of their appeal. And this shouldn't have been a surprise to the studios... the twist in The Usual Suspects came half a decade earlier, not to mention Empire Strikes Back.
My second least favorite thing studios do is cut the trailer in a way that makes the movie seem totally different or even a totally different genre.
Aside: a friend gave me the Sixth Sense dvd as a birthday gift one year, which I had yet to see, and my idiot roommate at that time was in the room couldn't restrain himself from trying to cleverly address my friend in a way that communicated he knew the twist. Except he'd never touched on clever in his life and gave it away instantly. Nice one Paul. Nice one.
Take Dark City. I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect.
Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-maker (as one would hope over the decades), but he expects that his audience would have kept up with him, introducing a kind of filmic vocabulary. I would say that Mulholland Drive is much, much more comprehensible once you have understood what Lost Highway is on about. In turn, Lost Highway is an extended riff off of the dualism you would see in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. As to the second factor, Lynch is very heavy into TM and he would like to present images, sounds, and such to the viewer, and then find out what the viewer thinks of them. Not in a "this is up to you to puzzle out," rather he is pitching rocks and skipping stones off of what he likely believes is to be a collective unconscious or a shared cultural experience, then being excited about what might pop up. It's a genuine interest, I think.
1998-99, there were at least 5 movies about simulations: Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Existenz, and The Thirteenth Floor.
Dark City is one of my favorite movies. Other than the color palette and genre, it has almost nothing in common with The Matrix. The plot beats are very different between the two movies.
What beats do you think are the same or similar between the two?
> If you have that kind of imagination — like the Wachowskis with The Matrix
I'm hesitant to say "based on", but the movie Dark City from 1998 (a year before The Matrix) is remarkably similar to it.
I only saw it around 2005 and the plot points for the first half of the two movies fit so closely I went looking to see if it was acknowledged anywhere. Other than people noticing the same thing, I don't recall finding anything, though.
Another somewhat relevant film: :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)
Dark City (1999)
An overlooked, but very enjoyable movie in the style of The Matrix. WARNING! The theater version was shoe-horned into an action movie format, including a very spoiler-heavy narration at the start. Either watch the Director's Cut, or mute sound and fast forward to when the title screen.
What a shame this YouTube channel ended. The videos were insightful and so well put-together. Making a video that is both informative and entertaining at the same time is much harder than it seems.
Are there are other film-related YouTube channels people recommend?
Two I recently discovered:
Mystery Clock Cinema: Film director Alex Proyas ('Dark City', 'I, Robot') talks on camera about independent filmmaking
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO7h2SOZjRah8bhyOXtGHw/videos
Ponysmasher: Film director David Sandberg ('Annabelle Creation', 'Shazam!') has a few behind-the-scenes videos and thoughts on filmmaking. The channel is not updated very often, but his most recent video 'Random Lessons Learned from Making Films' is very watchable and has a surprising (and very honest) revelation near the end of the video:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ponysmasher/videos
Annihilation, Dark City, Riddick Chronicles, Babylon A.D., Guardians of The Galaxy, Fast and Furious, Hummingbird, Transporter, Crank, Hardcore Henry, Revolver, Lucy, Ghost in The Shell, Now you see me, Passengers, Transcendence, Maze Runner, Limitless...
I think we've had a good run; I also think it's easy to be biased and not see it because of some nostalgia-effect of sorts. If you are f.e. 30+ you might more easily dismiss a movie as Limitless or Lucy as uncredible; both are based on a common myth that we only utilize a low percentage of our brains capacity, as an example, so they are that: unrealistic. But I think that's an unfair comparison because of an inherent bias that when you think about a movie like The Matrix you don't see it with the same critical lens because you perhaps had less knowledge of the world in your earlier years. #JustAFewThoughts
Seems like a good time to recommend Dark City (1998), for those who also like the "reality isn't what it seems" theme.
But skip the first 10-20 or so minutes of the film, because the narrator literally spells out the big twist at the very start.
Dark City is a great film, though this had me personally thinking more of Inception.
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
That's pretty blunt, but you are pointing out something real: all traits including intelligence are normally distributed, and the average IQ is 100.
Nobody wants to talk about this for the same reason that the abused wife and children who live under a borderline-psychotic alcoholic father don't talk about it: it's "reality," and we don't feel like there's anything we can do about it, and talking about it threatens our coping mechanisms. The human ability to not see is prodigious, probably an adaptation that has arisen precisely to help us cope with our condition. I once heard an anecdote from a psychologist about a woman who was raped by her father in the bed with her mother, and the mother claims to have seen nothing.
In our case the abusive father is "nature," a soulless chthonic process that did not think about the ethics of imbuing the agents in a Darwinian system with self-awareness, empathy, and consciousness. As far as we can see it just happened as a result of runaway evolution for central nervous system capability.
So nature builds random assortments of genes and throws them at the wall. Never mind that these "agents" experience their existence. If you happen to be born with no legs, then... well... you are born with no legs. If you happen to be born with a less efficient brain that makes the world a bewildering haze of incomprehensibly complex systems that all seem arrayed against you, then... too bad. You're just a trial permutation in an algorithm.
Watch the film Dark City. That is the human condition, only it's not being done to us by creepy aliens but by an unconscious natural process.
I happen to think we might be able to do something about this this century, and that Silicon Valley might have some part in that. But the irony is that the sort of folks who write screeds like this Medium piece would be the first to shriek and condemn any attempt to interfere with holy Nature and its blessed bell curve distribution of genetic traits. Even talking about it is threatening our coping mechanisms.
Society is getting more complex, but our genes are not changing that fast (if at all). Eventually a huge number of people are going to fall off a cliff where the economic value of their labor in a free market is <=0. That's actually completely disastrous for the entire economy, since it will cause the velocity of money to collapse and lead to political and social instability. Guaranteed minimum income is one way of dealing with this problem. Personally I think CRISPR is another. It's time to open our eyes and start doing something about our condition.
I really liked all of them, but episode 2 was probably my favourite of season 1. It is over the top compared to other parts of the series, but not compared to other experimental far future or alternate universe scifi. For example: Dark City, Idiocracy, Cube, Moon, Battle Royale, Maze Runner.
I don't normally go on "pop culture rants", but as an ex-whedon fan, he's the worst of the bunch for me, and I'd be more than happy to see his work relegated in favor of more unique IP. I can't deny the "technical quality" of his work, but eventually you watch enough sci-fi and realize that while of course everyone pulls heavily from their predecessors, Whedon takes the kitchen sink. Dollhouse was the breaking point for me, both in terms of it being a weak, less predictive imitation of RuR, and the fact that at the end of the day, he has a pattern. He has good actors for that pattern, but you see them enough times and seeing them more times isn't really adding to anything.
There's a lot of noise about mourning the death of sci-fi/cinema etc, but the gems have always been the outliers. Metropolis and later Dark City, Delicatessen/City of Lost Children, Firefly(yes, I'll give him that one, outlaw star has some things to say, but that plot trope was already as old as the Romans.), Primer, Dark Mirror, I'm rambling at this point and this is totally going to spawn another sci fi binge, but my takeaway is that there's been a reasonable stream of surprisingly good sci fi that has popped up in unpredictable places over the years, even into the torrent era. I have some faith it will continue to bubble to the top. My theory is that the only reason good sci fi seems so rare now is that it has become so swamped by bad sci fi as it has begun to fill the mainstream.
Google Plus is like the movie Dark City. It's a group of technical aliens picking apart the human experience, trying different scenarios in order to find out what the human soul is.
Once per day, humans wake up and find themselves in its meticulously-constructed parallel universe, doing things as ordinary humans do on other websites. Their activities, such as appreciating music and searching for lovers, feel familiar, necessary and meaningful, but at the same time, the unsettling atmosphere prevents the existential questions from settling deeply repressed where they should be. Instead, we're left wondering, "Why are we doing this here?" Isn't there something better? Is there a Shell Beach out there somewhere? Couldn't I just do this all myself on 1999-style website and live a more natural life?
Successful, albeit defunct, networks like MySpace work b/c above and beyond, they were passionate about connecting people with things they want. e.g. music... at all costs! Facebook reassures you that you dodged a bullet when you didn't marry your high school sweetheart. Google Plus just screams "use me. use me. use me for... everything or anything.. so that... um... so that google can keep track of what's hip and make money while I don't." There's no soul or love deep at the bottom.
There's a whole lot more I could say about passion, sacrifice, vulnerability, and empty vs. full cabinets, but I have a customer to service now, so I'll leave you with this hint: Germick is onto something with the google doodles. Hire me as a consultant if you really want to pick my brain.
I was bowled over by Ebert's fascination with Dark City and I really liked it the first time I watched. However, many years later, I watched it again and it left me bewildered as to why I liked this movie in the first. As much as I like and respect Roger Ebert, I think he was dead wrong on his fascination with this movie. Great movies do not fall off of the imaginative pedestal, only the bad one does.
As a professional movie critic, he earned respect through his craft, but I think world of cinema is better off without any movie critic.
Rest in peace. One of my favorite quote of his:
“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.”
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/
All great movies. Some others (with varying degrees of sophistication):
The 13th Floor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/)
A Scanner Darkly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)
Brazil (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)
Time Bandits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081633/)
Dark City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/) - A little disappointing at the end though =/
Forgot to add one thing--if you're curious what it's like to practice and learn in lucid dreams, then watch the scifi movie Dark City and look for the scenes where he's remembering being taught by the Doctor--the experience is almost exactly like that!
The thing that annoyed me about The Matrix is that I didn't think it was nearly as clever as it clearly thought it is. It had a pervasive smell of intellectual smugness. I much prefer movies that present themselves as rollicking good fun, but include some nice little bits of brain-fodder.
I liked Dark City a lot.
An excellent movie I enjoyed was: Dark City It was kind of like a precursor to The Matrix.
http://www.scifimoviepage.com/darkcity.html