Sy Fy

We watched Dark City last night, which is a relatively old movie - certainly before high definition and GPS. If you don't know the story, basically everyone wakes up at midnight with new memories. While parts of the movie were disjointed (how did the main character know where the automat was?) and unbelievable (Jennifer Connelly makes the worst club singer), there were some really cool concepts to this movie.

Photo credit: Ugo.com

The whole reason we were watching it was because I keep referencing it to my husband - "You know like how they erase your previous memories, sort of like in Dark City," and he had yet see it.

The cool concepts of this movie were about how your can't really remember certain things, like how many times you blinked today for example. The quote from the movie was, "How do you get to Shell Beach?" and no one remembers, or "When was the last time you remember doing anything during the day?" It's quite spooky if you think about it, especially if that happens in real life to you.

I started mapping out all the movies I've seen that involve either mind experiments, implanted memories, time travel, or other futuristic science fiction.  Here's my list so far:


Mind Experiments:
Dark City

Implanted Memories:
Blade Runner
Inception

Time Travel:
12 Monkeys
The Butterfly Effect
Returner
Pleasantville
Groundhog Day
Back to the Future
Terminator

Psychosis:
Shutter Island
Beautiful Mind
Vanilla Sky
Event Horizon
Memento
The Cell
Fight Club
The Shining - although there is the ghost element

Other:
Being John Malcovich

Of course, this list is by no means complete. What I like about the science fiction piece of movies is that we get to isolate and explore an interesting concept about people. With Dark City, we find out that people are more than a compilation of memories, even though the main character still clings to Shell Beach - or the memory of Shell Beach enough to recreate it with his mind.

What isn't said with this movie is that memories that we visit are really of places we went to, or what someone said or did. It's rarely what we did or said. In other words, if I woke up with a knife in hand and a body in the next room, I wouldn't go out for a killing spree. I might want to go to Virginia Beach, or Greenville, as these places have a "feeling" for me over a specific setting.

Anyway, I thought I'd make that point... The producer probably had to cut out that nuance because of budget constraints and the actors getting fed up with the director.