15 Fascinating Premises That Were Bigger Than The Movies Themselves

13. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

The Premise: Clementine goes to a specialist clinic to have all her memories of her ex-boyfriend Joel removed. Joel finds out and does the same, and the film tracks their relationship backwards through the deletion of his memories. Romance is a genre perhaps more formulaic than most. These days, directors try and avoid the more obvious cliches - often even by splitting up the main couple - but it's still difficult to put a new spin on such a familiar story. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is novel though, in that it visits the events of a relationship in reverse order; it starts with a break-up and ends with the couple meeting. Joel knows that his memories are being deleted, so he tries to hide from the process, eventually accepting that he can't stop it, and that he should just cherish those memories while he can. It's an interesting question; would you really want to forget absolutely everything about an ex-partner? Perhaps the final scene of the film poses a bigger question though; Clementine and Joel meet again, fall in love again, and discover that they had a two-year relationship that ended in memory deletion. Would you go out with someone you were in love with, knowing that it ended like that?