The Most Confusing Moments In Sci-Fi Movie History Explained

The future! Man, it's confusing, it's all giant space babies and metal fetishist and meat guns

What's up, everybody? Griffey here. If you caught yourself scratching your head at these

sci-fi films, this video's for you. You have a future in the past. Years ago for me, years from now for you

To this day, nobody's entirely sure if Christopher Nolan's tenant is a stroke of genius

or a pseudo-intellectual pile of crap. Even if you could understand what everyone's saying most of the time, which you can't

Well, do we better put it out of the hole before the bomb goes off, hey? The whole time inversion plot is pretty near impenetrable on a first watch

and the twist at the end that reveals John David Washington's protagonist's character's true identity

might be the most confusing of all. He's the mastermind behind the entire mission, or rather he will be at some point in the future

You never did tell me who recruited you, Neil. I only guessed by now

You did. Only not when he thought. The implication is that after they save the world there at the end of the movie

he inverts himself and lives an inverted time long enough to then create the tenant organization and recruit and train everyone

including Neil, who then recruits him, all so that their plan to save the world will happen the way it does

In fact, if you pay attention to his and Neil's dialogue at the end, Neil is talking about going back into the battle they just finished

but he's also essentially explaining the protagonist's larger game for the audience

What's happened, happened. which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world

It's not an excuse to do nothing. 2001 A Space Odyssey can be straightforward and easy to follow one moment

and then completely baffling the next. Things get particularly confusing towards the end of the film

after the trippy Stargate sequence, when Bowman finds himself trapped in bed in a strange room

where time loses all meaning. To cap it all off, the film ends with a massive celestial baby hovering over the earth

What the f***? Believe it or not, there's actually a concrete and simple explanation for the whole ending

In a phone interview in 1980, Cooper confirmed that Bowman is placed in a sort of human zoo by godlike entities so that they can study him

His sense of time is distorted and his entire life plays out in that strange captivity

Bowman is then transformed into the star child and returned to Earth as some sort of Superman

Arthur C. Clark's novels more or less confirmed that, too. In 2010, Odyssey 2, Bowman makes contact with a few characters as a sort of space ghost

Greetings, I'm space ghost. Space man. Space ghost. You were a space man who died and became a space ghost

I've always been dead, Conan. If you want to understand the ending of annihilation, you have to remember that line

And almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives

The film's main storyline follows a small team tasked with investigating a patch of wilderness

that's been overtaken by an otherworldly field dubbed the shimmer. Inside the shimmer, organic life mutates in unexpected and often horrifying ways

At the end, Natalie Portman's Lena finally reaches the lighthouse deep within the shimmer

where she stumbles on what appears to be the source of all these shape-shifting shenanigans

a nebulous sphere of otherworldly energy. Before you can wrap your head around what you're seeing

an alien figure emerges and takes Lena's own physical form. The blank figure mirrors Lena's movements

learning from them and evolving into a perfect copy of her, until Lena tricks it into holding a phosphorus grenade

and escapes the lighthouse. The entire sequence plays out without dialogue, leaving the viewer to try to keep up with what's happening

and interpret what it all means. So what does it all mean? Taking at face value

it's visualization of the film's running theme of self-destruction. Lena spends the whole movie motivated

not by self-preservation, but by the hope for atonement, and at least a little, her own quest for self-annihilation

Here she faced with the literal chance to destroy part of herself in order to continue her journey forward But there also a metaphorical angle If you remember Lena was cheating on her husband Kane before either of them went into the shimmer

One interesting theory is that the entire shimmer is a metaphor for the sort of cataclysmic internal evolution

Lena's forced to endure and her struggle to come out on the other side of a failing marriage intact

We're all damaged goods here. The theory makes even more sense when you realize that

that the house in the shimmer where the team holds up for the night is almost an exact copy of Lena's

and Kane's house. When Lina gets back to reality, as it were, she knows for a fact that the real

Kane is dead, and the person in the hospital is the same type of doppelganger she just supposedly

destroyed. But when he asks if she's her, she doesn't answer. She honestly doesn't know, but it also

doesn't matter. Whether changed by emotions or an alien force, she simply knows that neither of them

are the same person they once were. I don't want to talk about time travel

Because if we start talking about it, then we're going to be here all day talking about it

making diagrams with straws. Looper takes place in both the near and distant future

In the far future, getting away with murder is so difficult that the mob ops

to send their victims back in time to have people known as loopers killed them in the past

Eventually, the future version of the looper is sent back for death, closing the loop

Things get confusing pretty early when a looper named Seth lets the old version of himself escape

The mob folks aren't happy about this and send old Seth a message by carving it into young Seth's arm

Then you watch as little by little pieces start disappearing from old Seth

Each time he's horrified to see another part of himself missing. But the logical part of you says, wait

wouldn't he technically have had all those deformities for 30 years, along with the memories of them

Well, far be it for me to pretend to know the ends and outs of time travel, but the movie does do a pretty decent job of explaining

its in-universe rules. When the Joe's meet up in the diner, Bruce Willis explains that as a dude from the future

in the past, he exists in a sort of quantum state of possibility

Because my memories aren't really memories. They're just one possible eventuality now

The more probable an outcome is, the closer he is to existing as that possibility

Scars, memories, and so on only materialize once an outcome is certain, and vice versa

When young Joe starts to veer into a different life path, old Joe's memories of his wife start to fade

And when young Seth starts to lose body parts, old Seth finds himself with the sudden and horrifying memory

of losing those parts decades earlier. The key is none of these changes lead to paradoxes

or affect the future because the people who go back in time create a looped timeline separate from the main flow of time

That's why a guy who eventually has no legs could drive a car a few minutes earlier

And why in the movie it's so important to close the loop and permanently isolate it from the future

A man from the future is free long enough. Time travel, just fries your brain like an egg

Interstellar is a lot to take in the first time, but it's fairly simple for the most part

Coop and crew head through a wormhole to check up on some astronauts who went to a different galaxy

to find a replacement planet for Earth. But things get a little warped towards the end

Cooper falls towards the event horizon of a massive black hole and suddenly finds himself inside an infinite bookshelf

in his daughter's child, bedroom, where he passes on the message that kick-started the whole adventure

Don't you get to yours? I brought myself here. Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne worked as an executive producer consulting

on all of the science he matters, then wrote a whole book entitled The Science of Interstellar

which breaks the film down in minute detail. The simplified explanation for the book case sequence is that Cooper is actually inside of a

tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. The reality of this space is beyond his or our comprehension

So whoever created the Tessaract gives him a dumbed down version of it that he can understand and manipulate Cooper is moving through time as if it were a physical place Simple right And if you think about it if the Tesseract illustrates that all moments in time

always exist, then there will always be a Cooper in an eternal cycle of going into space

so he can send messages back in time that make sure he goes into space. So yeah, love may be able

to transcend space and time, but free will can suck it. 2004's primer is still one of the best time travel movies out there

which is even crazier since it was made for only $7,000. I won't spend the time here explaining every time loop

or every Abe and Aaron who's potentially out there at the end or how early Aaron knew what was going on

and when exactly he and Abe started trying to sabotage each other's attempts

to sabotage the project. But to make any sense of the plot

it at least helps to understand how the boxes themselves work. In essence, the box travels through time on a loop

You activate the box at point A in time, wait until the box runs to point B

then get into the box there, and ride the loop back to point A

Like Tenant, time travel is a one-for-one deal. You don't just zap back to 1955

If you want to go back in time one day, you have to spend one day in the box

Then you can live out that day already knowing what's going to happen, going ape on stonks and doing your best to avoid bumping into the other year's

that's running around or in a pinch drugging him and dragging him into the attic

Simple, right? The fountain is a visually gorgeous contemplation on life and death

It takes some mammoth narrative swings, and even if they don't all land perfectly, it's the

kind of movie you can revisit again and again. Together we will live forever

For ever. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weiss play different but connected. characters across three main timelines, and the plot is an epic love story between them

split through the 1500s, the 2000s, and the distant future. The modern day storyline is the most

straightforward and finds Jackman as a doctor trying and failing to save his wife Izzy who's dying

of cancer. Meanwhile, Jackman's future character travels through space in a magic ball

transporting himself in a tree to a star called Shebalba, which is also the name of the Mayan underworld

The tree is a factor in all three time periods. In the 1500s, time

timeline, Jackman's conquist or character is searching for the tree of life, which he finds and is destroyed by

In the contemporary timeline, Jackman uses an extract from the tree to try to treat his wife's cancer

When she dies, he plants a seed in her grave. In the future timeline, VICE's character has essentially become the tree

and now provides the sustenance that keeps Jackman's character alive at the cost of its own vitality

As convoluted as the whole thing is, it boils down to a simple idea, even if it's, you know, kind of depressing

The tree represents the quest to defeat death in all the timelines. But it's only in the future timeline when he leaves the tree behind that he actually becomes free of death

As director Darren Aronofsky said, ultimately the film is about coming to terms with your own death

So much for happy endings. We're almost there. Under the Skin is a brilliant example of a filmmaker

intentionally providing zero explanations about what's going on. So let's start with the obvious

Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed alien. She hunts humans and lures them into a mysterious black room where they sink into the floor and liquefy

And as abstract as the visuals may be, that's basically the whole thing

The alien's purpose on Earth is to harvest the biological material of humans

As director Jonathan Glazer explained, in an interview with film 4, the white and black rooms represent alien interiors that our human minds can't properly comprehend

Everything that happens within the black room represents the harvesting process, where the men are mined and left as empty husk of skin

The source novel spells out the aliens intentions and harvesting processes in more explicit detail Even if you seen Deni Ville Neve psychological thriller enemy multiple times

you probably still have one burning question. What the heck is going on with the spiders

The movie finds Jake Gyllenhaal playing two roles, Adam and Anthony. And when they learn of each other's existence, everything they think they know is called

into question. There are a lot of confusing parts, but every discussion

eventually comes back to those spiders. This is a pattern that repeats itself

In interviews, Villeneuve usually dodges questions about the eight-legged anomalies, but he once dropped a small hint at their meaning

In an interview featured on Amazon, he said, it's an image that I found that was a pretty hypnotic

and profound way to express something about femininity that I was looking to express in one image

That still doesn't explain much, but the spiders are clearly connected to femininity

in some way throughout the movie. and possibly Adam slash Anthony's view of women

The spider crushing scene at the beginning puts Anthony in a fetish club. He later sees a woman with the spider's head

and the giant spider hovering over Toronto comes right after he goes to see his mother

coincidentally, the most overbearing female presence in his world. Then, of course, his wife turns into that big-ass tarantula at the end

What interpretation is that the spiders are a metaphor for his views of women and commitment

trapping him in their webs. His entire life feels tethered to that ogy

There are webs everywhere. And at the end, when he was seemingly about to fall into his old patterns and cheat on his wife again

he doesn't seem the least bit surprised to find that she has, once again, reverted to his psychological view of her

You've become the video word made flesh. I am the video word made flesh

Videodrome is one of David Kronenberg's best films, and it's also one of his grossest

There are plenty of outrageous and baffling moments in the film, but one of the most confusing involves the flesh gun

After having a Betamax tape forced into a fleshy slit in his stomach

Max flees, then reaches inside himself and pulls out a goop-covered handgun

that immediately begins fusing to his hand with metal spikes. When he shoots people with the flesh gun

they start to bulge and burst apart. On the surface, all of this could just be for the sake of shock value

but it does follow the internal logic of the film and support its themes

As explained by Kronenberg and described in the original script, the gun isn't shooting bullets, it's shooting cancer, causing tumorous eruptions

Wren is becoming the human manifestation of the tumor causing broadcast signals

of the in-film videodrome show. He's the video word made flesh. Television is reality, and reality is less than television

Tetsuo the Iron Man is sort of the benchmark for bizarre Japanese sci-fi horror

As the film goes on, the main character, transforms into an increasingly grotesque abomination of metal and flesh, and eventually

he starts to like it. Director Shinya Sukamoto's unique vision is unlike anything else, and since there's

little in the way of an actual story going on, you have to kind of pick the pieces of the meaning

out of the twisted surrealism and experimental filmmaking. The man at the start of the film is a metal fetishist, and, you know

Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like. By violently encountering this character early in the film, the protagonist contracts what

could best be described is a kind of metallic STI from him, which then spreads throughout his body and others

The two keys to understanding the narrative of the film are the fact that in Tetsuo the Iron Man

metal and sexuality are intrinsically linked, and the metal mutations are themselves viral

propelling a twisted form of transhumanism from which there is no escape

for any of us