Forget Blade Runner, This Is the Best Cyberpunk Movie Ever Made (& I Can Explain Why)

There have been some great sci-fi movies over the years, but when people talk about genuine masterpieces, Blade Runner is almost always in the discussion. Directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner is a cerebral and smart sci-fi dystopian cyberpunk movie about a world where Replicants exist, which are similar to bio-engineered clones that a corporation created to work on space colonies. However, when some escape and head to Earth, a former cop named Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is recalled to hunt them down. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it is a story that asks hard questions about what it means to really be alive.

However, while Blade Runner is a sci-fi masterpiece, there is one movie that is better when it comes to cyberpunk films. That movie is Dark City, a cyberpunk dystopian film released in 1998.

Dark City Offers a Mind-Bending Spectacle in a Cyberpunk World

While Blade Runner is a masterpiece, Dark City does cyberpunk better than the Ridley Scott classic. Alex Proyas directed the movie after his incredible dystopian comic book movie The Crow, which itself is a massively popular cult classic. After proving in The Crow that he could create a violent and colorful dystopian world, he went darker with Dark City, where he created a world that was itself a mystery that the movie would then work to solve. At least that is how it was supposed to be. The studio believed viewers would be confused and demanded an opening voiceover that explained everything, spoiling the movie.

The good news is that fans today can see the movie as it was meant to be. Proyas got his director’s cut released, and that is the movie that is the cyberpunk movie that is even better than Blade Runner. The movie opens with a man named John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) waking up in a hotel bathtub with amnesia. He then gets a phone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), who tells him to run. He finds the body of a murdered woman in the hotel room, and he runs when men in trench coats known as the Strangers show up. This leads to a police inspector named Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) looking for John, who is the main suspect in the murder.

What starts as a murder mystery and a protagonist with amnesia turns into a dark, dystopian cyberpunk movie that is equal parts classical film noir and sci-fi horror movie. The Strangers are alien-like creatures, and as John searches for the truth, he realizes the world is not what it seems. This is where Dark City offered an early look at the kind of story The Matrix would tell a year later, but with aliens creating a massive prison world using human corpses replacing computers, using humans as batteries for a virtual reality world.

Just like Blade Runner, Dark City is a movie whose theme is the question of what makes a human a human. In Blade Runner, it is the Replicants’ right to live and whether they have human rights. However, in Dark City, it is a human who might not even be alive anymore, but does that make the being any less human? That is a theme that is even more important in cyberpunk stories than simple robots.

Even Roger Ebert Preferred Dark City to Blade Runner

While calling Dark City better than Blade Runner at anything might seem like a hot take, it wouldn’t be the first time someone did this. No less than Roger Ebert said that Dark City was a visionary achievement that delivered a more daring leap into the unknown than Blade Runner did. In fact, there are many people who consider Dark City the precursor to The Matrix, which came out just one year later.

Ebert gave Dark City a perfect four-out-of-four review, and he said the movie was “so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey.” That is some high praise because, even compared to Blade Runner, those two earlier movies are arguably the best and, more importantly, groundbreaking sci-fi movies in cinema history. Metropolis was one of the earliest examples of dystopian movies and cyberpunk movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey asked more important questions than almost any other sci-fi movie, and it is even more important than Blade Runner.

Dark City has a lot in common with those two classic movies. Like Metropolis, Dark City uses the German Expressionist filmmaking style to keep the entire film feeling off-balance and uneasy. It takes a world unlike anything we have ever seen and throws someone into it who isn’t ready for what he has to face. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it asks the viewers to question what is real, what existence really means, and what it means to be human. It is similar to the questions that Blade Runner asks, but in Dark City, the cyberpunk elements help it stand out, even from that masterpiece of sci-fi cinema.

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