Dark City

Dark City (1998) is about a man waking in a hotel room with no memory, in a city where the sun never rises. John Murdoch wakes in a bath. He does not know who he is. There is a body in the room and the telephone rings; a doctor tells him to run. He goes out and does not recognise the city. At midnight everyone falls asleep where they stand. Then the buildings begin to move: streets extend, houses rise, a family is relocated to another house, and when they wake their memories have been changed. The beings doing it are called the Strangers and they alter human memory by injection. The purpose is an experiment: to find what makes a person who they are. They change the memories and see whether the personality changes with them. Murdoch is the exception; the injection did not take, and he can do what they can do. The studio had an opening narration added. It explains the Strangers and what they are doing in the first two minutes, destroying the mystery before the film begins. Proyas objected and the narration was removed entirely from the director's cut. It came out a year before The Matrix, and the two were shot at the same studio in Australia, with some sets used by both. It failed commercially. Roger Ebert defended it, named it the best film of the year, and recorded a commentary for the disc. Kiefer Sutherland, Rufus Sewell and Jennifer Connelly star. It runs 100 minutes. Good for: science fiction, dark city design, and stories about identity. Less good for: the narration in the released version ruins the mystery; watch the director's cut if you can.