> If you have that kind of imagination — like the Wachowskis with The Matrix
I'm hesitant to say "based on", but the movie Dark City from 1998 (a year before The Matrix) is remarkably similar to it.
I only saw it around 2005 and the plot points for the first half of the two movies fit so closely I went looking to see if it was acknowledged anywhere. Other than people noticing the same thing, I don't recall finding anything, though.
Dark City is one of my favorite movies. Other than the color palette and genre, it has almost nothing in common with The Matrix. The plot beats are very different between the two movies.
What beats do you think are the same or similar between the two?
It was, as I said, around 15 years ago (and I haven't seen either one since then), so the details on why I thought that are rather fuzzy. It was strong enough that it's still the first thing I think of when seeing a statement akin to the one in the article.
A handful of points from comparing the Wikipedia plots and how I may have linked them together:
* Guided by the Doctor / Morpheus (or Trinity?) remotely (phone/computer prompts)
* Pursued by seemingly-supernatural Strangers / Agents (with subnote of how the Matrix alters the world in the Agents favor, and how the Strangers do the same directly themselves)
* Persistent feeling of the world being "wrong" somehow
* Getting their powers (vague memory: I think Murdoch used his powers more like how the humans did in The Matrix, than how the Strangers used them in Dark City)
I'm hesitant to say "based on", but the movie Dark City from 1998 (a year before The Matrix) is remarkably similar to it.
I only saw it around 2005 and the plot points for the first half of the two movies fit so closely I went looking to see if it was acknowledged anywhere. Other than people noticing the same thing, I don't recall finding anything, though.