Dark City is a true oddity. It feels like half a dozen movies that have come before it, from Metropolis to Brazil to Hellraiser. And its central theme--What constitutes the human soul?--is as old as time itself.

But Proyas has used his prodigious imagination to create something completely new, and at least in the early going, viewers will be seduced and amazed by his dark vision. The early scenes play out like a succession of hallucinations, appropriate to a film that continually asks viewers to question the nature of reality. The production designers, cribbing from Edward Hopper and Fritz Lang, have spared no effort to create a place that seems at once familiar, yet eerily inhuman. The plot's trajectory defies easy guessing, at least at first. And sequences of the city's transformation--the Tuning--are wondrous to behold.

But like most big cities, this one loses its charm after the audience has been there a while. Key scenes between Murdoch and his wife play flat, and the dialogue is awful: "Maybe I have lost my mind, but whoever I am, I'm no killer." Richard O'Brien (best known as Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) gives a nice creepiness to the head Stranger, inexplicably named Mr. Hand, and Sutherland does a nice job playing the doctor as a stammering weasel. But the other actors sleepwalk through their performances.

The main reason the film fails, though, is because it doesn't fulfill its promise. Proyas and co-writers Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer clearly wanted to make a thoughtful film in the best traditions of SF, but their work lacks real tension and suspense. Too much is revealed too soon, and when the dark secrets are made plain, they are overly literal and unsatisfying. Most disappointing is that, while the film dares to raise intriguing questions, it doesn't have the courage to answer them in any depth.