Unfathomable Heights.

Rating: 4/10 (11 September 2012)

A man (Sewell) wakes up in a bath tub, receives a phone call from a stranger (Sutherland) hysterically urging him to depart the premises pronto, runs out into the night-time streets, and is pursued by mysterious figures in black fedoras and long black overcoats, as well as a detective (Hurt) who believes him to be a serial killer. Later he runs into a woman (Connelly) who claims to be his wife but he has no memory of her. (I'd remember her.) Sewell, in fact, has no memory of anything at all from his past.
Out on the shabby city streets, surrounded by ominous and immensely tall buildings, Sewell is astounded. He can't tell what time period he's in because the cars are from the 40s and 50s. There are a few other people about but they all fall asleep at the same instant, no matter what they're doing at the time. It's always night. The sun never rises. And he runs through the alleys, hides in niches, clambers over roof tops, always pursued by either the cadaverous men in black clothes or by the relentless and humorless cop. Later, he'll see the buildings reshape themselves in a few minutes, the city changing its face.
I don't know if I want to give away what's going on. It would be difficult in any case because the plot is so full of twists and turns and so many of the events inexplicable. I'll say it has something to do with aliens experimenting with human reactions to staged circumstances.
It's all the product of a wild imagination -- Alex Proyas was the director and writer of the screenplay. I gather he'd opened the film with an explanation of what was up by Kiefer Sutherland, the mad scientist. It might have made for a less surprising but more comprehensible movie. As it is, all those dark scenes and paranoia depressed me. It was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, only the individual pieces were all drawn from different pictures and didn't fit together. Even at the end -- after the earth-shattering CGI confrontation, considerable doubt was left about what had just happened and what was going to happen.
I kind of like stories about the mysterious transformation of people, events, and things, but I prefer them to be rooted in some kind of reality I can get hold of. Imagination is one thing; chaos is another. When literally anything can happen at any time, there is no longer room for surprise. Give me "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or "Being John Malkovitch". And I hope I never live to see another exploding head.