complexity
19 films tagged with “complexity”
Tenet
Most espionage films ask their protagonist to acquire information. Tenet asks its protagonist to operate without it. The Protagonist — unnamed, because naming would imply a stable identity that the film's structure works…
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival does something rare in science fiction: it places language — not weapons, not technology — at the centre of first contact. Louise Banks is recruited not to fight but to understand. The film's p…
Interstellar
Professor Brand's lie is the centre of the film, and it is worth taking apart because it is not a simple deception. Brand has spent decades working on an equation that would allow humanity to manipulate gravity well enou…
Synecdoche, New York
Caden Cotard receives a MacArthur grant and uses it to build the most ambitious theatrical production anyone has ever attempted: a life-size reproduction of New York City inside a warehouse in Manhattan, populated by act…
Zodiac
The film is structured as an investigation that refuses to converge, and the structure is the argument. Fincher begins with the murders — sudden, arbitrary, filmed with a flatness that drains them of the dramatic tension…
Paprika
The parade is the image that stays. A procession of refrigerators, Shinto gates, tin dolls, daruma figures, brass bands, and household gods marches through Tokyo with the formal logic of a religious festival, and the str…
Primer
Two engineers build something in a garage and then lose track of what it does. That is the whole of Primer, and it is also the reason the film has a reputation for being impossible to follow. The unintelligibility is not…
A Beautiful Mind
The Nash equilibrium describes a state in a game where no player can improve their outcome by changing strategy alone, given the strategies of all other players. It is one of the most important ideas in twentieth-century…
eXistenZ
Cronenberg's speculative technology is not digital but biological. The game pods in eXistenZ are grown from synthetic amphibian eggs, they connect to the player's spinal cord through an umbilical cord plugged into a surg…
Pi
Max Cohen restates his assumptions at the beginning of the film: mathematics is the language of nature; everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers; if you graph the numbers of any system, patt…
Contact
The signal from Vega arrives as prime numbers, and the film is precise about why this matters. Primes are the one pattern that natural processes do not produce — no star, no pulsar, no geological formation generates a se…
Ghost in the Shell
The question the film poses is not whether an artificial mind can be conscious. It is whether a human mind, having replaced enough of itself, still is. Major Kusanagi's body is entirely prosthetic — manufactured, maintai…
Twelve Monkeys
The scientists in 2035 send James Cole to 1996 and he arrives in 1990. They try again and he arrives in the trenches of the First World War. They pull him back, recalibrate, and send him to the correct year, where he ide…
Akira
The opening image is an explosion — a white sphere expanding outward from the centre of Tokyo in 1988, swallowing the city in a single frame. The film never explains what the explosion was, and this is its first structur…
Stalker
Something happened in a corner of an unnamed country, and afterwards that corner stopped obeying the rules. The government fenced it off, posted soldiers, and stopped explaining. What is left inside is the purest depicti…
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Roy Neary is driving a power company truck down an Indiana road when something comes over the hill and lights him up. He does not know what it is. What he knows, afterwards, is that he has received a signal, and the sign…
Chinatown
The mystery in Chinatown is solved completely, and the solving changes nothing. Jake Gittes identifies the crime — the diversion of public water to destroy the agricultural value of the San Fernando Valley so that land c…
Solaris
The ocean on Solaris responds. That is the established scientific fact at the beginning of the film, and it is also the end of what anyone can say with confidence. An entire discipline — Solaristics — has been built arou…
Andrei Rublev
The bell-casting sequence of Andrei Rublev runs nearly forty minutes, occupies the final episode of a three-hour film, and contains the most complete depiction of craft under radical uncertainty ever committed to any med…