The folks out at Indican Pictures had just one more surprise for me–a special advance look at Dark Metropolis, and it’s actually really nice, except it’s kind of familiar.
Dark Metropolis follows the combination of humans and Ghen, in which the humans created the Ghen to serve as a slave race. Labor, product testing, all like that. And eventually, the Ghen, with their superior genetics, broke free of the humans’ control and decided turnabout was fair play. Somehow, while engaging in a three hundred year war with the humans, the Ghen built a series of underground cities and a whole civilization. Meanwhile, humanity’s civilization and cities fell apart, leaving them prime for Ghen conquest. Now humanity is the slave race, and the Ghen the masters. At least, that’s until the alien Kalendoah showed up and started channeling their pure energy through the humans, rather, one human in particular. Now the Ghen want this human, the Channeler, under their control–but will they get their way and doom humanity forever?
The visuals here are surprisingly impressive for low-budget science fiction, which is a pretty big surprise by most any standard, and the idea is certainly sweeping enough for three science fiction epics, which is something of a problem, even though it’s mostly a good thing. It’s almost a little too ambitious for its own good–they had a good thing going with the humans / Ghen thing. Adding on the Kalendoah, the bizarre energy beings who occasionally crop up, is a little on the unnecessary side. Still though, between the great look and the huge plot, this could easily be an entire series on, say, SyFy, rather than an eighty five minute movie.
But there are plenty of problems here–if it weren’t for the lack of giant armored exoskeletons, this would be almost the exact same plot as a Saturday morning cartoon from back in the mid 1990s called Exosquad. I’ll leave it to you to check up on the similarities, and you’ll find there are surprisingly many here. Some might make comparisons between this and the massive lump of godawful sludge known as Battlefield Earth, but at least that had some action in it.
No, it’s not the lack of originality or the overambitious nature of the plot that’s the big problem with Dark Metropolis, the problem is the script itself. It’s so thoroughly dependent on dialogue that it literally will not shut up. At any given point, someone is talking. Human, Ghen, Kalendoah through Human…someone somewhere will always be talking in Dark Metropolis, and they will not. Shut. UP. Ever.
The worst part is when they actually present weapons, but don’t use them for better than the first half of the movie. Why? Because they’re too busy throwing soliliquy at the audience like a Three Stooges short chucked cream pies. This may well be some of the blandest, dullest science fiction I’ve ever seen. Dystopia should not be this boring. And worse, when they actually do remember they have weapons, and fire them, the effect is almost laughably low-quality.
Of course, all of this does need to be viewed in the light that it’s the first part of three (at last report) and plenty of trilogies have started off badly and ended pretty well. I remember The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and how I actually fell asleep during The Fellowship of the Ring. Still though, this is pretty snoozeworthy material. It actually does manage to get a bit more interesting in the last ten minutes or so, but this is too little too late for this one.
The Screenhead Ten Scale wakes up from its brief catnap and hands Dark Metropolis a four out of ten for being almost painfully dull, but while still acknowledging that there’s hope for this thing yet. It’s better split over a larger time frame, but it’s still too much dialogue in too little space.
