Revisiting Dark City (directed by Alex Proyas and scripted by Proyas, David S. Goyer, and Lem Dobbs) after a decade, I’m surprised at how transparently ridiculous it all is: John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) telekinetically shattering a jail window so he can give his wife a final kiss; an asthmatic crippled Kiefer Sutherland delivering a truckload of exposition via memory injections; and a sea of black-clad albinos at the base of a giant Metropolis-head chanting, “He can tune!” Yet the film is unabashed in its ridiculousness. It doesn’t have to justify anything to its audience, and instead drives forward on sheer emotion and sensation.

Someone who recently saw the film for the first time joked to me that it was “Inception (#39) meets The Matrix meets Harry Potter (#1)” — funny because of course Dark City predates all three, but intriguing because those films dictate the boundaries of mainstream representation of the fantastic, along with the special effects that are used to perform that representation. Inception deploys its effects with a cool cerebral detachment; of course a zero-gravity spinning hallway fistfight is the logical outcome of events in that film. Harry Potter has progressed from childhood whimsy to existential apocalypse, but its magic is always in contrast to and contained by the mundane.

Dark City doesn’t do any of that. Keep in mind that it does try to explain its fantastic elements within the context of the plot; the focus here — and it’s an important distinction — is in how the special effects function in the film. The question is: does Dark City attempt verisimilitude with its effects? If not, what is it doing?

Consider the watershed film Jurassic Park (a film I can unironically say probably changed my life). Previously, when trying to represent something blatantly fantastic (magic) or internal (dream), it came at some level of abstraction or surrealism, or via practical effects that had a physicality and connection to reality. The audience reaction to this kind of fantasy effect on the level of perception is either to cling onto its formal and constructed qualities, or to focus on the parts that are rooted in physical reality. Both types of perception can occur at the same time, but the state of film technology in the past meant that the two were nonetheless distinct ways of seeing.

But Jurassic Park was one of the films that crystallized at the moment of the computer-generated revolution, and it presented a space in which those two modes of perception were blurred and confused beyond recognition. It’s not something that can only be done with computers — many of the stunning dinosaur effects in the film were done with puppets — but it showed how the digital effect, untethered from reality, could inspire an entirely different mode of perception. It’s the film as theme park ride, where we’re fully cognizant of the unreality we’re seeing but our suspension of disbelief — our search for pleasure — keeps us floating in a state of doublethink where things are real and unreal at the same time. That’s the paradigm of the fantastic that Jurassic Park set: the unreal must be seamless with the real. Inception and Harry Potter trigger their perception of the fantastic in a way that is seamless. (It’s this powerful state of confusion that leads to something like the “Avatar blues” being an actual thing, or the shock of realization that you might have in finding out that in The Social Network (#36), there’s one real Winklevoss twin and one CG-face-replaced twin.)

Dark City doesn’t even try to hide its seams. It’s a tale of a world gone mad with a protagonist who’s perhaps even madder. There’s a love story and a search for identity and the promised land in there, but it’s really a film ruled by its effects, which are all blatantly announced and constructed. The process of building a world in the film frame — the domain of the special effect — is exposed here for what it is. Even in the grim paranoid darkness of the German Expressionist aesthetic the film pulls from, there’s a kind of joy in the abandon with which it molds the world like a lump of clay, unfettered by the strictly-circumscribed rule-based worlds of Inception and Harry Potter. The gulf here is like the separation between The Matrix and its sequels, with Dark City more like the latter. That might sound like a condemnation, but there’s an endearing quality to that which is recklessly imperfect.

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “Through the masking of narrative, Dark City unravels Bergman-esque assertions of the nature of humanity.” I would have said Murnau — this is the film he would have made if he could have shown a flying telekinetic knife fight — but nice try)