Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
While The Matrix is rightly billed as the most successful and inventive science fiction film of the 1990s, Alex Proyas’ criminally overlooked Dark City deserves to be mentioned on the same level. After all, the Wachowski siblings were so impressed by the visual tableau and production design of Dark City that they purchased props and parts of the set and recycled them in the first Matrix movie. Fusing neo-noir tropes with science fiction tenets and a splash of old school horror, Proyas set out to make a disorienting Kafkaesque nightmare on par with a classic Twilight Zone episode.
While The Matrix is rightly billed as the most successful and inventive science fiction film of the 1990s, Alex Proyas’ criminally overlooked Dark City deserves to be mentioned on the same level. After all, the Wachowski siblings were so impressed by the visual tableau and production design of Dark City that they purchased props and parts of the set and recycled them in the first Matrix movie. Fusing neo-noir tropes with science fiction tenets and a splash of old school horror, Proyas set out to make a disorienting Kafkaesque nightmare on par with a classic Twilight Zone episode.
