The “visionary” 1998 movie Roger Ebert called an instant masterpiece: “It is a triumph”
As one of the cinema’s undeniable masterpieces, any movie would love to be mentioned in the same breath as 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially when that breath is coming from Roger Ebert.
The critic cited his review of Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1968 sci-fi as the best he’d ever written, largely because he was one of the few people in attendance at the first screening who immediately understood they were witnessing cinematic history in the making.
The auteur poured years into the production, diligently working out the story and developing new, cutting-edge methods of realising his vision on the biggest screen possible, but when it played to a packed house for the first time, hundreds of people walked out, not knowing what the fuck they’d just watched.
Through a modern lens, it’s ludicrous to imagine anyone storming out of A Space Odyssey, the film that single-handedly inspired some of the modern era’s biggest directorial names, covering everyone from Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve to James Cameron and Ridley Scott, never mind the way it laid the groundwork that eventually led George Lucas to Star Wars.
With that in mind, and the fact that Ebert considered it one of the ten finest features he’d seen in his life, which puts it right at the head of the pack when he’d literally seen tens of thousands of them, it takes a pretty special picture to convince him that it’s worth being mentioned as a touchstone. It wasn’t just 2001, though, but he compared it to three separate seminal sci-fi flicks.
“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,” he wrote, giving it the full four-star treatment. “Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects, and imagination.”
Not content with name-dropping Fritz Lang and Kubrick, Ebert threw Ridley Scott into the mix, too. “Like Blade Runner, it imagines a city of the future,” he noted. “But while Blade Runner extended existing trends, Dark City leaps into the unknown.” Metropolis, 2001, and Blade Runner? If you hadn’t figured it out by now, Ebert fucking loved this movie.
How much did Ebert love Dark City? He loved it so much that he recorded an audio commentary for its home video release, but no amount of adulation could convince paying customers to check it out at their local multiplex, with Proyas’ ambitious neo-noir doing what all cult films do and bombing at the box office.
It might have fared better had it been released a year later, with The Matrix carrying more than a few echoes of Dark City and turning mainstream Hollywood on its head, but it wasn’t to be. It may not be as towering as the three titles he compared it to, but clearly, the critic believed that it deserved to be.
