Edward
Bartender
- Messages
- 26,355
- Location
- London, UK
Edward, you should really make a point of checking out Dark City, it's a great little neo-noir SF flick. Suitably mysterious, beautifully production-designed and shot, and well acted by Rufus Sewell (in a rare lead role), Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland...
I vastly prefer it to The Matrix, which came out a year later and shares a bunch of plot similarities with Dark City.
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The Matrix was a funny one. I was entertained well enough by it when it came out, but the hype around it left me cold. I think at the time I felt an awful lot of people were really reaching to try and read far more into it than was really there. The growth of incel culture adopting it as an allegory in recent years hasn't really endeared it to me tbh, though I keep meaning to give it a rewatch since the Wachowski sisters have stated it to be an allegory for gender transition, out of curiosity to see how it plays with that in mind. What really snipped my interest in it originally, though, was the sequels. I vaguely remember them being promoted with a claim that it had always been intended to be part of a trilogy, but... The first one worked perfectly well as a standalone, and for me was only diminished by the sequels, which I found uninspiring and derivative. Yes, the original story wasn't massively original in its essence, but it was told in its own way. As they expanded the 'real' world in the second and third films, they just felt to me to be lazier and lazier, every Hollywood cliche of A Future Dystopia.


