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Have you considered "Not being creepy"? It did wonders for me.

The Spoiler:

... except you aren't supposed to know about the aliens (called the Strangers) until late into the movie. Before then, Dark City plays like a stylistic murder mystery about an amnesiac who thinks he's being framed for killing a bunch of people, and it's precisely that foundation of reality that makes the subsequent sci-fi reveal so powerful and memorable. Someone should really have told the studio that and stopped them from imposing an opening narration on the movie that immediately told everyone about the aliens:

" First there was darkness. Then came the Strangers. They were a race as old as time itself. They had mastered the ultimate technology: the ability to alter physical reality by will alone. They called this ability "Tuning." But they were dying. Their civilization was in decline, and so they abandoned their world, seeking a cure for their own mortality."

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The narration (which was included in the movie because the initial test audiences were confused by the plot) is removed in the director's cut, but if you saw Dark City in cinemas or standard releases, you mostly knew what to expect from it in the first few minutes. Suddenly the protagonist's confusion over the events that were unfolding around him was no longer shared by the viewers because the movie just told us that, in this world, there are aliens who can change reality. Hell, the main character could suddenly switch races or become an anthropomorphized turnip, and you still wouldn't bat an eye because reality-shaping aliens!