Buoyed by the success of his debut feature The Crow, Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas embarked upon this ambitious sci-fi noir epic, a work that truly defied definition and/or categorisation – a fact that in no small part possibly contributed to its critical and box-office failure. Working from a script penned in tandem with David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight) and Lem Dobbs, Proyas crafted a waking nightmare, inspired in turn by Metropolis, Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ and the art of Edward Hopper. Troubled everyman Rufus Sewell awakens in a bathtub suffering from amnesia; before long he’s being pursued for a grisly murder he may or may not have committed by hard-boiled cop William Hurt and a shadowy gang of strangers (led by Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien). All, suffice to say, is not as it seems. Proyas later returned to commercial favour with such formulaic genre fare as I, Robot.