Memento is seriously overhyped in terms of being confusing. It's not the most straightforward movie of all time, but it's pretty easily understandable.
And how the hell is Inception even on the list?
Inception is almost definitely on there because of people who don't understand that the final shot is supposed to be ambiguous.
There are plenty of points in that movie where you're not expected to know exactly what layer you're operating in. So even barring the conclusion, questions like "Which characters were real?" and "When was anyone awake?" hang in the air.
Exactly, but some people are so used to not understanding things that they see that hanging question and figure that there is an answer but that they must have missed something, so they go ahead and google it to try to find the answer.
they see that hanging question and figure that there is an answer
There are definitely hints and suggestions presented - particularly in hindsight - that a given scene may have been a dream. And for people who don't want to watch the movie a dozen times while carefully rewinding between scenes and taking exhaustive notes, its nice to have a YouTube Personality lay it all out for you in an entertaining manner.
But there's also a commercialized hype angle to this, wherein YouTubers who even implicitly promote a movie can get kickbacks from studios looking to saturate the airwaves with name recognition. So just churning out ten minutes of schlock content with "THE REAL SECRET BEHIND BOSS BABY!!!" on top of a soy face splash screen gets you more views because you're coasting on some billion dollar studio's promotion budget. And once enough people figure this algorithmic shit out, the market becomes saturated with lazy crap takes on whatever keyword is trending.
Then we get a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of Tim Pool / Ben Shapiro clones all just saying "BOSS BABY! BOSS BABY!" over and over again on their feeds, and their viewers echoing the opinions on Barstool Sports or Reddit until it shows up under every Google search, and then Wikipedia editors jumping on the bandwagon to get some clout by posting "The Boss Baby Mystery" subsection, and then this idiotic take becomes some kind of institutional understanding of media.
What starts out as a good natured conversation about the cryptic nature of a fun summer thriller becomes some obnoxious meme-tier rant by a bunch of chuds and blue checkmarks.
it's the opposite of straightforward! it's straightbackward!
Pretty bad selection criteria. I would expect Primer to be on the list but it's just not as well known as these other movies. I'd say only Donnie Darko, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and Tenent deserve to be on this list but the rest aren't that hard to understand. But you know, if I had a pet theory about any of these other movies, I might make a search like this to have it confirmed or rebutted.
I was hoping to see other Kaufman movies, thinking that people might be interested in learning more about humanity through what Kaufman meant to convey in, say, Synecdoche New York, but nope, it's Nolan.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things was super weird, and since I watched it in the height of the pandemic, I really don't remember it at all.
Primer rocked, also highly recommend the Spanish movie Timecrimes. I remember thinking at the time that it used an inversion of the time travel mechanics of Primer and that it was cool that it was a tight enough rule system to still work in reverse.
Tenet felt less like a movie with a plot and more like a mash-up of every half baked "cool" idea Nolan had while writing, and all the ideas are just different variations on the "time reversal" gimmick.
[Felix Black Mirror voice]: "Wot if there was guns that fired backwards in time and the bullets wen in the gun instead of out"
"Wot if you inverted time and it made fire cold"
"Wot if some blokes got in a fight with themselves from the future but they was backwards"
"Wot if a car drove backwards"
the premise as I understand it is that there is an organization, founded in the future in response to climate catastrophe that has figured out how to move backward through time... and was originally using it to orchestrate the prevention of catastrophe. this mission soon devolved into just collapsing nation states / sewing chaos and a generally nihilistic conquest of the past by those using this new found power to live well/achieve their own personal goals.
the organization the protagonist is recruited into is a clandestine attempt to counter these forces and protect humanity/a livable future without deference to any nation.
personally, I thought this was an intriguing concept
- time travel, but only at the same rate as one can move forward
- fighting enemies from the future
though it was executed poorly (I think it's too complex of a world/conflict to fit into a single movie) though with incredibly precise spectacle. it probably would have made a nice book series for hard sci fi dorks and maybe a miniseries down the road if the characters were strong.
I've seen the flick twice (the first time I was like "wtf was that shit?" so I watched it again a year later) and it's a huge fucking mess narratively, but I can't just openly hate all over it. there's a weird and potentially captivating story trapped in that hulking, smoking wreckage.
edit: both times I watched with h subtitles. I watch everything with subtitles.
this mission soon devolved into just collapsing nation states / sewing chaos and a generally nihilistic conquest of the past by those using this new found power to live well/achieve their own personal goals.
Also this shit was made possible by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Funny, how even reactionary shitheads can feel that the absence of the USSR has made the world worse.
:very-smart: But those are all cool ideas. And while I don't really remember the plot, it's mainly a "mess" because the plot is portrayed backwards and forwards for almost the entire movie.
I do have to appreciate the villains of the time travel movie are just some Russian arms dealers
Tenet had bad acting besides Pattinson, and there were definitely big mistakes especially with the end scene, but there's like an hour long sequence that's just sooooo cool that it makes the movie worth it
I saw Tenet in theatres, the mixing was so bad I don't think I was able to hear a single complete line of dialogue.
I don't know if the script is confusing, but I was lost as fuck because I only heard 60% of it.
This is a serial problem with Nolan movies, he's got two huge glaring weaknesses as a director that I in my plebian perspective can analyse and that's that he sucks at sound mixing across the board, and he can't direct an action fight scene to save his life
Damn you just reminded me that when I watched Parasite the subtitles were WAY out of sync and I spent like half an hour firstly determining that yes, they do actually have to be out of sync and I'm not crazy, and then trying to line them up correctly.
On a slightly different note, I still haven't seen Inland Empire because I sat down to watch it with a couple friends one night and after twenty minutes or so we were all like, "uhh are the Polish parts supposed to have subs?" And if you google about if Inland Empire is supposed to have subs you have people saying "lol yes of course" followed by responses of people saying "I saw it in theaters with no subs and also my DVD doesn't have any" and apparently there's an interview where David Lynch talks about why he chose not to include them. By the time we found a sub file it was too late to watch the movie :sadness-abysmal:
The overwhelming majority of those movies aren't even remotely confusing, lol.
sees a movie with a straightforward linear plot but a twist and time travel element wow, how avant garde and confusing
We created a movie that only makes narrative sense if you watch it inside out, upside down, and backwards.
Lolz, why you confused tho?
Like, a bunch of these films make the non-linear narrative the entire draw. Or use heavy handed metaphors and literary allusions to obscure the message as a kind of trivia-contest for the audience.
Watching "What Dreams May Come" and not leaving the film a bit turned around would imply you fell asleep through most of it.
Watching “What Dreams May Come” and not leaving the film a bit turned around would imply you fell asleep through most of it.
Did you read a different list from me?
average popcorn munching rube is very stupid, yes, yes, but i think the methodology and conclusions of this listicle are weak. like surely this has as much to do with how many people saw a movie as it does with what proportion of them were confused by the plot. additionally, regardless of how one feels about the "movie explainer" genre of content (i think it mostly sucks, personally), it's not really concerned with explaining complex plots so much as gleaning every ounce of surface meaning out of every moment of a movie and presenting it in a coherent, objective-seeming rapid sequence. It's why something like half these movies are nonlinear or have some end twist that reframes the rest of the movie: the literal plot might be clear to a viewer, but presented out of order, they might want to consider the full significance of earlier scenes in the light of later ones.
Anyway watch After Last Season
according to how often the film’s title and “explained” is searched on the internet. After compiling a list of 150 films renowned for their puzzling plots and ambiguous endings
people care less about it. this isn't actually the list of the most confusing movies, just the most popular movies that have even the slightest hint of ambiguity. and then also a few legitimately confusing movies that a sizable chunk of viewers needed to google after
I really wish the author took some creative freedom and opened up with a few cliche Nolan movies, then went hog wild with some genuinely weird and confusing stuff. I clicked hoping for some movie recs :deeper-sadness:
Predestination spells it out for you like 3 time during ending. I can see how people find it weird, as it's about fucking yourself with time travel, but not confusing.
