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Avg. Critic Score: 66 out of 100 Generally favorable reviews Metascore® based on all critic reviews
Information for Parents:
14 Iffy for 14+
Read Common Sense Media review

Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 100
    Washington Post | Stephen Hunter

    If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will. Read full review

  • 100
    Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

    A great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." Read full review

  • 90
    Washington Post | Rita Kempley

    Obliged to go from lost soul to demigod, Sewell's performance is as fascinating as Proyas's mystical vision. Read full review

  • 75
    USA Today |

    Fascinating, visionary filmmaking. With its amber-tinged palette and its distinctively dystopian view of life, it may be the most unique-looking film we've seen in ages...[but] defies logic and makes frightening and unexpected leaps. Read full review

  • 70
    The New York Times | Stephen Holden

    So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone. Read full review

  • 58
    Entertainment Weekly | Ty Burr

    It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic. Read full review

  • 50
    San Francisco Chronicle | Peter Stack

    Dark City grabs your eyeballs and squeezes. Read full review

  • 50
    Austin Chronicle | Marc Savlov

    Looks like a million bucks (or rather, a million bucks gone to compost), but at its dark heart it's a tedious, bewildering affair, lovely to look at but with all the substance of a dissipating dream. Read full review

  • 50
    Variety | Todd McCarthy

    What they have done is taken a few second-hand ideas from noir and speculative fiction and mixed them in occasionally striking ways, even if, in the end, the result isn't all that much fun. Read full review

  • 40
    Los Angeles Times | John Anderson

    Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well. Read full review

View more reviews for Dark City on Metacritic

Information for Parents
Common Sense Media says Iffy for 14+ Mind-stretching, futuristic sci-fi can get gory.
What Parents Need to Know Parents need to know that there is brief female nudity in a subplot about a helpful prostitute/single mother, though no sex results. She gets murdered for her troubles in helping out the hero, and there are several bloodied corpses plus fantasy violence in which zombie-like beings are decapitated or smashed. The nightmare imagery, recalling ghosts, vampires, and zombies (but with a sci-fi explanation) can be unnerving to sensitive viewers. A "director's cut" DVD lacks the opening narration that explains much of the complicated setup; some viewers might find this non-narrated version confusing.
  • Families can talk about the motivations and actions of "the strangers." The movie never tells us how the Dark City came to be created or humans arrived there. Ask kids if they don't mind that such details are left to the imagination. Do they like this cerebral head trip as much as the more action-focused The Matrix or not, and why?
The good stuff
  • message true0 Positive messages: In its weird way the film affirms the human spirit and individuality ("the soul"), compared to the super-powered but stagnant and dying alien race that holds people captive here. Even though the hero is set up to think he's a Ripper-like murderer, he really isn't, and even villainous-seeming characters are secretly working toward the liberation of humanity.
What to watch for
  • violence false4 Violence: Brief shots of bloody victims (female) of knife-killings, with spiral designs cut into flesh. Some of the zombie-like "strangers" get smashed/impaled, and one has the top of his head sheared off. Hypodermic needles plunged into foreheads.
  • sex false3 Sex: Female nudity (topless and in profile) of a prostitute, bare-butt shot of the hero. Talk of an adulterous affair (which turns out not to have really happened).
  • language false0 Language: Not an issue
  • consumerism false0 Consumerism: Not an issue
  • drugsalcoholtobacco false2 Drinking, drugs and smoking: Some cigarette smoking, social drinking as backdrop.
An independent nonprofit dedicated to providing families the information they need to help kids thrive in a world of media and technology. © Common Sense Media Inc. 2010. All rights reserved.

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