A lush and beautiful, under-appreciated near masterpiece, possibly overlooked because the theatrical cut was a horrendously compromised attempt to dumb the narrative down for general audiences. The director's cut is a simmering, slinky, robust ride through the halls of sanity.
I think director's cuts are almost invariably superior to editors' cuts; editors work for the studio and usually care mostly about what the studio wants in terms of content, sellability and length. Directors, whose vision the piece was in the first place, have a much, much better idea of how it should play out. I don't think they're at all "interesting additional data," they're how the movie was supposed to be in the first place.
Which is a fair point, on reflection: there's a lot to be said for the director's original intent being definitive. On a related note (since Dark City pays a fair bit of homage), I'm very much looking forward to the nearly-complete cut of Metropolis coming in a year or two, when they finish restoration of the print they found in Argentina!
I only saw the Directors cut and I still didn't like it. Maybe I'm one of those people for whom the theatrical release was apparently dumbed down, but I just didn't get it. It seemed to me like one of those movies where somebody had "a really cool idea, man" and then made it into a script for the primary purpose of it being cool. It presented itself as a highly moralistic film, but the moral was muddied. I'm not at all sure I know what I was supposed to get out of it, and frankly, I'm not sure the writer knew
( ... )
You're clearly an intelligent person, so I find it hard to buy that you didn't get it. Didn't like it, maybe, but I can't imagine it was lost on you unless you just stopped paying attention.
I always enjoyed this film for it's fetishy dark scifi/fantasy nerd appeal (in such realms, I am pretty easy to please), but now I must watch the director's cut and see how it improves.
Primarily, the theatrical cut included a scrolling text at the beginning, which more or less removed any suspense, as it revealed what was going on the whole time. The director's cut allows the audience to discover what's happening along with the protagonist, which makes for a much more tense film and makes better use of the design and atmosphere that it captured. There are other edits and cosmetic changes that help, too, but that's the most glaring atrocity visited upon this film by the initial edit.
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On a related note (since Dark City pays a fair bit of homage), I'm very much looking forward to the nearly-complete cut of Metropolis coming in a year or two, when they finish restoration of the print they found in Argentina!
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