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Dark City VHS DVD

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This review contains spoilers.  If you don't want the movie ruined, don't read any further.

A very interesting science fiction story.

It's an amnesiac story, a somewhat common sci fi plot tool.  That give the writer a way to reveal the world to the audience by revealing it to the main character.  The story is set in what looks like the late '50s or early '60s.  (It turns out it's not.)

A very hard story to summarize.  Obviously, the world isn't as it seems.   Everyone falls asleep at the same time every night.  A very few people sometimes stay awake and see what happens during that period.  One person start pointing out to everyone else that nobody can remember the last daylight they've seen.   Nobody can seem to remember how to get to get this beach resort that's just on the edge of town.  They remember the place.  Some even had their honeymoon there.   But for some reason the route to get there slips their mind.

From one day to the next the main character notices that some people are living different lives than they did the day before.  Their memories have been altered.

It turns out to be a plot by aliens, of course.  They can change the world by a process called "tuning."  And this one scientist can change people's memories by injecting a concoction he came up with into their brains.  Two very hard-to-digest plot devices.  Especially since there's really no need for the needle-in-the-brain squirm inducer.  In an artery would have been fine, thank you.   And the tuning scenes are over-dramatic.

But, that doesn't kill the movie.  Apparently the aliens are a hive mentality (though there were some lapses that belied this) and they're studying this city-full of humans hoping to learn about our passion for life.  The good guy wins after a brute-force battle.  Though one wonders what is to become of the ship.

On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Matinee.  Not as pretty as The Matrix, but a better science fiction story.

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