December 31, 2021

Resurrecting Dark City

I have watched the reviews of the new Matrix 4 and I will spare myself the pain of actually watching this so-called "film." 

The new Matrix was not made with love or passion. It makes a mockery of the original ideas and characters. A rewatch of the first one is time better spent.

A rewatch of classic films is always a better idea than watching the new stuff. 

Hollywood is not in the business of making good movies or producing quality entertainment anymore. It has become a total instrument of psychological warfare. Sure, propaganda films have always been made. That is in the DNA of Hollywood. But movies today are an assault on the consciousness of human beings. 

The destruction of characters like Neo or Luke Skywalker is a deliberate attack on the hero figure. Filmmakers of this era aren't making new stories with new heroes, or even recrafting old myths in a new light. They are destroying what was built and replacing it with trash. 

There is a death of the imagination in Hollywood.

But there are glimmers of creativity. 

I am hopeful that the creators of a rebooted Dark City will do better justice to the original material than the "creators" of The Matrix. But, you never know these days. 

II.

""Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis'' and "2001: A Space Odyssey.'' If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then "Dark City'' is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination." - Roger Ebert, "Dark City" February 27, 1998.

An excerpt from, "Alex Proyas is developing a Dark City TV series" by EJ MORENO, Flickering Myth, August 15, 2021:
“Dark City right now is really an intriguing one to me because we’re developing a series, a Dark City Series,” Proyas explained to Lynch. “Which we’re in the very early stages [of], but I’m having to reanalyze in order to construct a new story. I’m having to go back and kind of jog my memory as to what we actually did and what I think worked and what I think didn’t work and reevaluate my own film, so that’s been a very interesting experience as well; which I’ve not done before.”

Video Title: Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City. Source: Hughezy Entertainment. Date Published: February 8, 2020.

Video Title: Similarities between The Matrix and Dark City. Source: Jon Warhol. Date Published: February 3, 2021.