Jon Solo Sebastian 01/14/2026:

Week Two: Dark City

I’m slightly late to the party with my second movie, but I watched it this past Sunday (the 11^th). This is a film I haven’t seen since it released in 1998, so it felt like a brand new movie for me.

I saw this film was coming out in 4K right around the holiday’s, and I sort of mentioned to a few family members that it would be cool to watch it again. Well, I received it as a gift on Christmas from my stepson, which was a nice gift!

Just a few comments about this one:

This movie was bleeping weird!! Not in a bad way, but it wasn’t like anything else I’ve seen even though it had a familiar vibe to other things I’ve seen. For me, it was a fun mixture of The Matrix, The Crow (1994, Alex Proyas directed this and The Crow), the television series Fringe, and a little bit of Flatliners (1990). I’m not a huge follower of directors to where I can point out who directed a film without looking it up, but since The Crow is my favorite movie and I’ve seen it over 100 times, I easily would have known Alex Proyas directed Dark City… if I hadn’t known before watching it. He has a very particular style and art direction, especially in dark science-fiction storytelling.

The movie, without spoiling anything, has a “man in black” type of thing going on, but they aren’t what you think they are, and neither is the city. The “man in black” characters had to have been used as inspiration for the Observers in the television series: Fringe because they look similar, and they’re also messing with the timeline and testing subjects… in a way.

The cast was stacked with actors like Kiefer Sutherland, Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, and Ian Richardson.

In order to not spoil anything in the film, I won’t go much further, but here is a short summary from the back cover:

“Dark City is a mind-bending science fiction thriller set in a shadowy world where the sun never rises and nothing is quite what it seems.

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory of who he is or how he got there, but there’s a body on the floor with bloody spirals carved into the flesh and a voice on the phone that tells him to flee. Soon Murdoch is on the run, wanted by the police, a woman who claims to be his wife and a group of mysterious pale men who seem to control everyone and everything in the city… except him.” Strap yourselves in for this thrilling and weird movie!!

I hadn’t planned on rating or reviewing the movies I watch, but going forward, I think I will do a rating system.

Dark City: 8/10

I asked my wife to pick movie number three, so I have no idea what I’ll be watching this weekend!