The future! Man, it's confusing with all its giant space babies and metal fetishists and meat guns. If you caught yourself scratching your head at these sci-fi films, this video's for you.
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00:00The future!
00:01Man, it's confusing, it's all giant space babies and metal fetishists and meat guns.
00:05What's up everybody, Griffy here.
00:08If you caught yourself scratching your head at these sci-fi films, this video's for
00:12you.
00:13You have a future in the past, years ago for me, years from now for you.
00:18To this day, nobody's entirely sure if Christopher Nolan's Tenet is a stroke of genius or a
00:23pseudo-intellectual pile of crap.
00:26Even if you could understand what everyone's saying most of the time, which you can't,
00:33the whole time inversion plot is pretty near impenetrable on a first watch, and the twist
00:38at the end that reveals John David Washington's protagonist character's true identity might
00:43be the most confusing of all.
00:45He's the mastermind behind the entire mission, or rather, he will be at some point in the
00:49future.
00:50Hey, you never did tell me who recruited you, Neil.
00:53I only guessed by now.
00:54You did.
00:55Only not when you thought.
00:59The implication is that after they save the world there at the end of the movie, he inverts
01:03himself and lives an inverted time long enough to then create the Tenet organization and
01:08recruit and train everyone, including Neil, who then recruits him, all so that their plan
01:13to save the world will happen the way it does.
01:16In fact, if you pay attention to his and Neil's dialogue at the end, Neil is talking about
01:20going back into the battle they just finished, but he's also essentially explaining the
01:24protagonist's larger game for the audience.
01:27What's happened's happened, which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the
01:32world.
01:33It's not an excuse to do nothing.
01:362001 A Space Odyssey can be straightforward and easy to follow one moment and then completely
01:41baffling the next.
01:43Things get particularly confusing towards the end of the film, after the trippy Stargate
01:47sequence, when Bowman finds himself trapped in bed in a strange room where time loses
01:52all meaning.
01:53To cap it all off, the film ends with a massive celestial baby hovering over the earth.
02:03What the f**k?
02:05Believe it or not, there's actually a concrete and simple explanation for the whole ending.
02:10In a phone interview in 1980, Cooper confirmed that Bowman is placed in a sort of human zoo
02:15by god-like entities so that they can study him.
02:18His sense of time is distorted, and his entire life plays out in that strange captivity.
02:23Bowman is then transformed into the Starchild and returned to Earth as some sort of Superman.
02:28Arthur C. Clarke's novels more or less confirm that, too.
02:31In 2010 Odyssey 2, Bowman makes contact with a few characters as a sort of space ghost.
02:37Greetings, I'm space ghost.
02:39Space man.
02:40Space ghost.
02:41You were a space man who died and became a space ghost.
02:44I've always been dead, Conan.
02:46If you want to understand the ending of Annihilation, you have to remember that line.
02:50And almost all of us self-destruct.
02:52In some way, in some part of our lives.
02:55The film's main storyline follows a small team tasked with investigating a patch of
02:59wilderness that's been overtaken by an otherworldly field dubbed the Shimmer.
03:04Inside the Shimmer, organic life mutates in unexpected and often horrifying ways.
03:09At the end, Natalie Portman's Lena finally reaches the lighthouse deep within the Shimmer,
03:14where she stumbles on what appears to be the source of all these shapeshifting shenanigans
03:18– a nebulous sphere of otherworldly energy.
03:22Before you can wrap your head around what you're seeing, an alien figure emerges and
03:26takes Lena's own physical form.
03:28The blank figure mirrors Lena's movements, learning from them and evolving into a perfect
03:33copy of her, until Lena tricks it into holding a phosphorous grenade and escapes the lighthouse.
03:38The entire sequence plays out without dialogue, leaving the viewer to try to keep up with
03:42what's happening and interpret what it all means.
03:45So what does it all mean?
03:47Taken at face value, it's a visualization of the film's running theme of self-destruction.
03:51Lena spends the whole movie motivated not by self-preservation, but by the hope for
03:56atonement, and at least a little, her own quest for self-annihilation.
04:00Here she's faced with the literal chance to destroy part of herself in order to continue
04:04her journey forward.
04:06But there's also a metaphorical angle.
04:08If you remember, Lena was cheating on her husband Kane before either of them went into
04:12the Shimmer.
04:14One interesting theory is that the entire Shimmer is a metaphor for the sort of cataclysmic
04:18internal evolution Lena's forced to endure in her struggle to come out on the other side
04:23of a failing marriage intact.
04:25We're all damaged goods here.
04:28The theory makes even more sense when you realize that the house in the Shimmer where
04:31the team holds up for the night is almost an exact copy of Lena's and Kane's house.
04:37When Lena gets back to reality, as it were, she knows for a fact that the real Kane is
04:41dead, and the person in the hospital is the same type of doppelganger she just supposedly
04:46destroyed.
04:47But when he asks if she's her, she doesn't answer.
04:51She honestly doesn't know, but it also doesn't matter.
04:54Whether changed by emotions or an alien force, she simply knows that neither of them are
04:58the same person they once were.
05:00I don't want to talk about time travel s**t, because if we start talking about it, then
05:05we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.
05:10Looper takes place in both the near and distant future.
05:13In the far future, getting away with murder is so difficult that the mob opts to send
05:17their victims back in time to have people known as Loopers kill them in the past.
05:21Eventually, the future version of the Looper is sent back for death, closing the loop.
05:26Things get confusing pretty early when a Looper named Seth lets the old version of himself
05:31escape.
05:32The mob folks aren't happy about this and send old Seth a message by carving it into
05:36young Seth's arm.
05:37Then you watch as little by little pieces start disappearing from old Seth.
05:41Each time he's horrified to see another part of himself missing.
05:45But the logical part of you says, wait, wouldn't he technically have had all those deformities
05:49for 30 years, along with the memories of them?
05:52Well, far be it from me to pretend to know the ins and outs of time travel, but the movie
05:56does do a pretty decent job of explaining its in-universe rules.
06:00When the Joes meet up in the diner, Bruce Willis explains that as a dude from the future
06:04in the past, he exists in a sort of quantum state of possibility.
06:08Because my memories aren't really memories, they're just one possible eventuality now.
06:14The more probable an outcome is, the closer he is to existing as that possibility.
06:19Scars, memories, and so on only materialize once an outcome is certain, and vice versa.
06:25When young Joe starts to veer into a different life path, old Joe's memories of his wife
06:29start to fade.
06:30And when young Seth starts to lose body parts, old Seth finds himself with the sudden and
06:34horrifying memory of losing those parts decades earlier.
06:38The key is none of these changes lead to paradoxes or affect the future because the people who
06:42go back in time create a looped timeline separate from the main flow of time.
06:48That's why a guy who eventually has no legs could drive a car a few minutes earlier, and
06:52why in the movie it's so important to close the loop and permanently isolate it from the future.
06:58A man from the future is free long enough, and this time travel shit just fries your
07:04brain like an egg.
07:06Interstellar is a lot to take in the first time, but it's fairly simple for the most part.
07:11Coop and crew head through a wormhole to check up on some astronauts who went to a different
07:15galaxy to find a replacement planet for Earth.
07:17But things get a little warped towards the end.
07:20Cooper falls towards the event horizon of a massive black hole, and suddenly finds himself
07:24inside an infinite bookshelf in his daughter's childhood bedroom, where he passes on the
07:29message that kickstarted the whole adventure.
07:32Don't you get any guitars?
07:35I brought myself here.
07:37Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne worked as an executive producer consulting
07:42on all of the science he matters, then wrote a whole book entitled The Science of Interstellar,
07:47which breaks the film down in minute detail.
07:50The simplified explanation for the bookcase sequence is that Cooper is actually inside
07:54of a tesseract, a four dimensional cube.
07:57The reality of this space is beyond his or our comprehension, so whoever created the
08:02tesseract gives him a dumbed down version of it that he can understand and manipulate.
08:07Cooper is moving through time as if it were a physical place.
08:11Simple right?
08:15And if you think about it, if the tesseract illustrates that all moments in time always
08:19exist, then there will always be a Cooper in an eternal cycle of going into space so
08:23he can send messages back in time that make sure he goes into space.
08:27So yeah, love may be able to transcend space and time, but free will can suck it.
08:332004's Primer is still one of the best time travel movies out there, which is even crazier
08:39since it was made for only $7,000.
08:42I won't spend the time here explaining every time loop, or every Abe and Aaron who's potentially
08:47out there at the end, or how early Aaron knew what was going on, and when exactly he and
08:52Abe started trying to sabotage each other's attempts to sabotage the project.
08:57But to make any sense of the plot, it at least helps to understand how the boxes themselves
09:01work.
09:02In essence, the box travels through time on a loop.
09:05You activate the box at point A in time, wait until the box runs to point B, then get into
09:10the box there and ride the loop back to point A.
09:14Like Tenet, time travel is a one-for-one deal.
09:17You don't just zap back to 1955.
09:20If you want to go back in time one day, you have to spend one day in the box.
09:24Then you can live out that day already knowing what's going to happen.
09:28Going Abe on stonks, and doing your best to avoid bumping into the other yourself that's
09:32running around, or in a pinch drugging him and dragging him into the attic.
09:36Simple, right?
09:39The Fountain is a visually gorgeous contemplation on life and death.
09:43It takes some mammoth narrative swings, and even if they don't all land perfectly, it's
09:48the kind of movie you can revisit again and again.
09:50Together we will live forever, forever, forever.
09:59Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play different, but connected characters across three main
10:03timelines, and the plot is an epic love story between them split through the 1500s, 2000s,
10:09and the distant future.
10:10The modern day storyline is the most straightforward, and finds Jackman as a doctor trying and failing
10:15to save his wife Izzy, who's dying of cancer.
10:19Meanwhile Jackman's future character travels through space in a magic ball, transporting
10:23himself in a tree to a star called Xibalba, which is also the name of the Mayan underworld.
10:28The tree is a factor in all three time periods.
10:30In the 1500s timeline, Jackman's conquistador character is searching for the Tree of Life,
10:35which he finds and is destroyed by.
10:38In the contemporary timeline, Jackman uses an extract from the tree to try to treat his
10:42wife's cancer.
10:43When she dies, he plants a seed in her grave.
10:46In the future timeline, Weisz's character has essentially become the tree, and now provides
10:51the sustenance that keeps Jackman's character alive at the cost of its own vitality.
10:55As convoluted as the whole thing is, it boils down to a simple idea, even if it's you know
11:00kind of depressing.
11:02The tree represents the quest to defeat death in all the timelines, but it's only in the
11:06future timeline, when he leaves the tree behind, that he actually becomes free of death.
11:12As director Darren Aronofsky said,
11:14Ultimately, the film is about coming to terms with your own death.
11:17So much for happy endings.
11:19We're almost there.
11:23Under the Skin is a brilliant example of a filmmaker intentionally providing zero explanations
11:28about what's going on.
11:29So let's start with the obvious.
11:31Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed alien.
11:34She hunts humans and lures them into a mysterious black room, where they sink into the floor
11:38and liquefy.
11:40And as abstract as the visuals may be, that's basically the whole thing.
11:44The alien's purpose on Earth is to harvest the biological material of humans.
11:49As director Jonathan Glazer explained in an interview with Film Four,
11:52The white and black rooms represent alien interiors that our human minds can't properly comprehend.
11:59Everything that happens within the black room represents the harvesting process, where the
12:02men are mined and left as empty husks of skin.
12:06The source novel spells out the alien's intentions and harvesting processes in more explicit detail.
12:11Alan?
12:19Even if you've seen Denis Villeneuve's psychological thriller Enemy multiple times,
12:24you probably still have one burning question.
12:26What the heck is going on with the spiders?
12:29The movie finds Jake Gyllenhaal playing two roles, Adam and Anthony, and when they learn
12:34of each other's existence, everything they think they know is called into question.
12:38There are a lot of confusing parts, but every discussion eventually comes back to those spiders.
12:43This is a pattern that repeats itself.
12:47In interviews, Villeneuve usually dodges questions about the eight-legged anomalies, but he once
12:52dropped a small hint at their meaning.
12:54In an interview featured on Amazon, he said,
12:57It's an image that I found that was a pretty hypnotic and profound way to express something
13:01about femininity that I was looking to express in one image.
13:05That still doesn't explain much, but the spiders are clearly connected to femininity in some
13:09way throughout the movie, and possibly Adam-slash-Anthony's view of women.
13:14The spider-crushing scene at the beginning puts Anthony in a fetish club.
13:18He later sees a woman with a spider's head, and the giant spider hovering over Toronto
13:22comes right after he goes to see his mother, coincidentally the most overbearing female
13:27presence in his world.
13:28Then, of course, his wife turns into that big-ass tarantula at the end.
13:33One interpretation is that the spiders are a metaphor for his views of women and commitment,
13:38trapping him in their webs.
13:40His entire life feels tethered to that analogy.
13:42There are webs everywhere.
13:44And at the end, when he was seemingly about to fall into his old patterns and cheat on
13:48his wife again, he doesn't seem the least bit surprised to find that she has, once again,
13:53reverted to his psychological view of her.
13:56You've become the video word made flesh.
14:01I am the video word made flesh.
14:05Videodrome is one of David Cronenberg's best films, and it's also one of his grossest.
14:09There are plenty of outrageous and baffling moments in the film, but one of the most confusing
14:14involves the flesh gun.
14:16After having a Betamax tape forced into a fleshy slit in his stomach, Max flees, then
14:21reaches inside himself and pulls out a goop-covered handgun that immediately begins fusing to
14:25his hand with metal spikes.
14:27When he shoots people with the flesh gun, they start to bulge and burst apart.
14:32On the surface, all of this could just be for the sake of shock value, but it does follow
14:36the internal logic of the film and support its themes.
14:39As explained by Cronenberg and described in the original script, the gun isn't shooting
14:43bullets, it's shooting cancer, causing tumorous eruptions.
14:47Rin is becoming the human manifestation of the tumor-causing broadcast signals of the
14:52in-film Videodrome show.
14:54He's the video word made flesh.
14:57Television is reality, and reality is less than television.
15:03Tetsuo the Iron Man is sort of the benchmark for bizarre Japanese sci-fi horror.
15:08As the film goes on, the main character transforms into an increasingly grotesque abomination
15:13of metal and flesh, and eventually, he starts to like it.
15:22Director Shinya Tsukamoto's unique vision is unlike anything else, and since there's
15:27little in the way of an actual story going on, you have to kind of pick the pieces of
15:32the meaning out of the twisted surrealism and experimental filmmaking.
15:36The man at the start of the film is a metal fetishist, and yes, that's exactly what
15:41it sounds like.
15:42By violently encountering this character early in the film, the protagonist contracts what
15:46could best be described as a kind of metallic STI from him, which then spreads throughout
15:51his body and others.
15:53The two keys to understanding the narrative of the film are the fact that in Tetsuo the
15:57Iron Man, metal and sexuality are intrinsically linked, and the metal mutations are themselves
16:03viral, propelling a twisted form of transhumanism from which there is no escape for any of us.
16:12If this is the case, shall we turn the world into a mass of steel?