10 Great Movies You Didn't Understand The First Time

2. Primer

Whereas Memento is a simple story told in a complicated way, Primer is an example of a complex story made even more complex by the way its told. If someone told you they understood Primer the first time, they're liars because by the time the third act rolled around, everyone had already lost track of how things were happening.

When two friends accidentally invent time travel, the results are appropriately disastrous, with both falling prey to the temptation of selfishness and a lack of vision towards the bigger picture. The quickly overbearing number of trips they make, and the nearly-impossible to understand scientific dialogue make this one really tough to comprehend as it happens. The way the film doesn't dumb down the science has been praised by many, but it also makes a good chunk of the movie extremely hard to follow for the layman.

Primer is one of the few examples of a movie that actually requires looking at a graph to even begin to make sense of how the plot works out.