Dark City (1998)

A highly stylized neo-noir sci-fi Memento, and a lower budget and less refined visual precursor to Sin City. Really nice world and set design and general environment; the CGI is plentiful and dated, but was well done and isn't too distracting. What is too distracting is that everybody rapidly mumbles soliloquies to explain the sci-fi backstory, and, despite having seen this movie at least five times, I've still probably missed 30% of the explanations.

John Murdoch runs around trying to remember who he is, though more than that he'd really just like to go to the beach. He can't seem to find the beach, or orient in a direction that might eventually lead to a beach. People get real cagey when he asks them how to get there. It has a good representation of the human brain's tendency to fill in unknown knowledge gaps, and react with anger and resentment when those gaps are pointed out.

Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt, the final crime boss in A History of Violence) is chasing him around because of his suspicious connections to prostitute serial killings, but knows he probably didn't kill them. He just has to keep chasing to uncover the mementos.

John figures out that he has a wife, Jennifer Connelly, and hunts her down, as does the detective, and they swirl about with mismatched memories and poorly defined suspicions for a while until Kiefer Sutherland pops up and explains that it's aliens, man.

Pale-faced Matrix-y trenchcoated aliens rebuild the city every night while the humans are in suspended animation, and inject them with new memories. They all have memories of beaches that have never actually existed. Murdoch woke up in the middle of a reprogramming, so his memory is all corrupted, but he can also manipulate time and space with his brain for no particular reason. The aliens don't like losing their monopoly on telepathy, and try to hunt him down.

Aliens win and reprogram Murdoch, but Kiefer has one last trick up his sleeve, and the new super-memory Murdoch destroys them with super powers and finally rotates the city, which turns out to be an isolated disc floating in space, towards the sun for the very first time. He makes a beach.