无尽

人类最古老、最强烈的感情是恐惧，而最古老、最强烈的恐惧，是对未知的恐惧。不愧是哥俩的自编自导自演，剧情的展开和推进，非常的顺畅，剪辑手法到位，饱满的剧情与角色，哥俩的表现也很不错。这让我想起了逃出绝命镇和仲夏夜惊魂，习以为常的日常中的异常，在平缓的和谐氛围中又透露着一丝丝的诡谲，在一丝丝的深入骨髓，一丝丝的勾引着你。而主角那种带有克制的质疑与不适感，真的很符合这凝滞的气氛，细细琐琐的线索，引导着剧情前进，擦拭着层层的迷雾。渐渐地，异常，变得愈多愈明显，迷者愈迷，疑者愈疑。迷雾中的端倪，朦朦胧胧，但是，没有那种矫情的故弄玄虚。吻合克苏鲁的一切，迷雾一样，梦幻一般，高维不可具象化，这就是克苏鲁，用抽象的罗夏墨迹来形容克苏鲁，怪贴切的，相比星之彩，这部更加深沉含蓄与耐人寻味。最后也终于理解了，没有所谓邪教，没有对错与恶意，只是在无尽的轮回中的，失去意义的无趣，眼底的深哀与苦中作乐，以及仍不忘给你的善良与忠告。饱含哲理的话语，那一幕相隔的轻轻一挥，伫立火中不屈的身影，其中味道万千。而果然，与开头相呼应，朋友之间会相对频繁的向彼此倾诉自己的感情，而兄弟姐妹则会等待一个更为方便的时机，比如临终之前。兄弟俩再次定义了彼此，逃出生天，伴随着成员们眼中的期盼与安静的转身，而转身后，面对成员们的又是无尽的轮回。现实中的你，面对虚幻时，你会怎样选择呢，瞬间与漫长，你会怎样选择呢，这样不可逆的选择，会心动吗，会后悔吗。该作对于时空以及克苏鲁的描绘，伴以演员们出彩的表现，相当生动令人印象深刻，这无尽时空轮回，对比着现实中历史的不可逆，发人深思，这直到死亡的日复一日，也是重复的轮回吗，你也在苦中作乐吗，你充满希望还是无奈呢，抗争还是屈服呢，我们的生活中，存在深渊吗，深渊是什么呢，我们深陷其中无法挣脱吗，也许，答案就像那未解的方程式吧，哈哈哈。深渊，一直在凝视着你

没时间读完的朋友，简单总结就是导演说了，结尾是happy ending，不是loop，兄弟俩逃出生天。

http://collider.com/the-endless-explained-interview/

‘The Endless’ Filmmakers on Their Trippy Mythology & Deciphering That Ending

This week, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead‘s The Endless rolls out on Blu-ray and digital, which means that folks nationwide are going to be unravelling the headtrip horrors of the film’s unnerving, mysterious Lovecraftian mythology and looking for some answers.Earlier this month, I published the first part of my conversationwith the filmmaking duo, which spanned from the duo’s early ideas for expanding the universe they built in their first film, Resolution, to the experience of taking the finished versionThe Endless around the world. And now that the movie has hit more theaters, it seems like a good time to serve up the spoilery portion of the interview, which dives into what to make of the film’s mysterious mythology and ending.

If you need a refresher, The Endless follows Benson and Moorhead as Justin and Aaron (yes, they’re using their real names, but no, they’re no playing themselves), a pair of bickering brothers always at odds who return to the UFO death cult they escaped as kids in search of answers. Except when they get there, they don’t find a UFO death cult at all, but a happy and healthy, if admittedly weird and unsettling, commune of people living life on their own terms. They also find something more sinister lurking in the hillsides of the remote camp — an unseen, oppressive presence that communicates through voyeuristic photographs and video clips, trapping people in time-loop prisons where it manipulates and torments them into various horrific fates for its own amusement. A frontiersman trapped in a loop of mere seconds, a man who has to kill himself every few minutes to prevent a worse fate, and the local cult, who have it relatively easy by comparison — living out a decently long three-moon loop that ends with their “ascension,” aka being shredded into bloody bits. Yikes. At least they don’t have to worry about aging.

Image via Well Go USA

And of course, there’s the return of Mike (Peter Ciella) and Chris (Vinny Curran) from Resolution,who are trapped in the bitter week-long loop of forced sobriety and failing friendship detailed in the 2002 film. The unseen evil in The Endless is the same chilling cosmic threat we met in Resolution, and the films share more crossovers thanyou’d probably imagine on a first watch, so you’re looking for more answers on The Endless, a rewatch of Resolution is the perfect place to start. Or first watch if you caught The Endless first, which works just as well.

However, if you’re looking for an easy play-by-play explanation of what goes down in the film, you’re not going to get it from Benson and Moorhead, who insist everything you need to solve the puzzles of their unconventional cinematic universe can be found right there on screen. However, the duo was more than happy to dive into the ideation behind the film’s mythology and the mindset behind ending it the way they did, so check out the interview below for a discussion of the different ways their “monster” is revealed through the characters and settings in the film, the ideas that helped inspire the unseen menace, and why the ending is more about character payoff than answering specific questions.

I know you guys have said you have this whole mythology totally down from top to tail. Was that something that you had already achieved at the time ofResolutionor did that come later?

JUSTIN BENSON: It’s definitely expanded.

AARON MOORHEAD: The rules didn’t change.

BENSON: But like withResolutionthere were … In both of these movies, there have been massive documents of things that people never see. And it’s really cool because we’re pretty sure people feel these things in the movie. The things that are into that. But like in the case ofResolution, for example. The unseen antagonist ofResolution, which is the same unseen antagonist inThe Endless, obviously. Except inResolution, the point of view of the whole film is from the unseen antagonist. There was like a massive document that went into everything about that “monster” that went to our sound designer to help them design the sound of the whole film. So that existed duringResolutionand there are things in that document that ended up more conspicuous inThe Endlessthan expanded upon. That’s just like one example of one thing.

When it comes to how nailed down the mythology is… Whenthe camera pulls back on that canyon and you see all those bubbles, the time prisons, would you be able to look at that shot and say exactly what’s happening in each one of them?

Image via Well Go USA

MOORHEAD: I can tell you how long those loops are, when they reset, and all of that. That exact area, we know it pretty well. And that’s desert, so there’s a whole bunch of poor animals. It’s probably something like that, but I wouldn’t say that we have an entire map of the world and who’s in it. But it wouldn’t be hard to theorize. We definitely have enough. So it would be pretty easy to take a good gander. And then, the little sequence that — the music trimmings for the montage that follows Justin and Aaron walking past the big totem and it’s in the sort of monolith carved monster looking thing.

BENSON: The rusty dragon sculpture.

MOORHEAD: And the rusty dragon sculpture. So those would all be individual loops that have developed their own sub-cultures and have their own interpretation of what this unseen antagonist is. Depending on how they saw it, the state of mind they’re in, and their own personalities, and all of that. And that these things they’ve created are artistic representations of how they see the antagonist. Whether they’re going specifically through the loop you see in the distance, because they do walk off, that we don’t know. And luckily, we only shot in 4K so you can’t really punch in. [Laughs]

BENSON: And what’s funny is … it’s weird how important that sequence was to us because in the movie we basically, the oldest loop that you ever see is what, 1800 something? Some kind of frontiersman like in a tent, but we have a non-existent Easter Island type subculture that developed its own kind of mythology around it. Clearly. And of course, Native Americans with the totem pole. But even the monolith to us — which is kind of the big image of the film anyways — to us. it’s supposed to scare the hell out of you when you realize that’s what that is. When you realize that, that’s the antagonist of the film as seen by people that are so ancient they’re gone in America.

In a similar vein, along with those monoliths I loved the ways we see this presence interpreted through the eyes of the characters in the film, like Lizzie’s art and Hal’s equation. What was your process of creating all these different understandings of this one being?

MOORHEAD: I mean, that’s something that did start with Resolution but it’s so small. It’s so small. It’s like literally there’s a journal running during the credits sequence of Resolution. It’s a bunch of monster sketches, and that would have been what the French researchers in Resolution were seeing it as. So that goes way back. I don’t even remember anymore what the inspiration for that was. Besides the fact that, unless you can get Giger, the guy who did Alien, unless you have a designer on that level to build a monster … We’re just trying to figure out ways that we can present it visually when we need to at least hint at something and not just show nothing, always. And in this case, we get to show it through sketches, and through sculptures, and things like that.

Image via Well Go USA

In the case of Spring, we showed a monster because the premise alluded to nature as being our designer. And since we don’t have our own Giger, we come up with these, hopefully interesting, clever ways to show an otherworldly being or “monster” and it won’t be really uneventful.

I mean if you wanted to pour a glass of wine, on a dark night and think about it. There’s this idea of every civilization has developed an idea of a deity and a God. And their interpretation of it has trickled down into our religions today. Or died out. But in the same way, their visualizations of it have looked so wildly different. And a lot of the time there’s the idea that … There’s two ideas. One is, what if it’s the same thing? What if they’re all the same thing? Of course, unified religion theory, which is kind of an idea that we play with. But we’re merging it with the idea of, what if wasn’t God? What if it was just a monster? Or what if people with porphyria were seen as vampires? You know, that kind of an idea where it’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing metaphysical about it.” Obviously, our movie’s metaphysical. But what if it was a natural phenomenon that people just tried to interpret as a god. And that’s a lot of what we’re talking about with this; they saw it as God and it’s actually just this thing.

BENSON: And as you saying that, I just remembered where it comes from. It comes from … This is a deep cut. There’s a guy named John Keel, who’s the guy who wrote The Mothman Prophecies. The book is very different from the movie. It’s not a fictional narrative. It’s sort of a journalist’s account of what happened in an area over a period of time. He wrote a whole collection of other books. The one that I’ve read is Our Haunted Planet and what it’s basically about is this concept of ultra-terrestrials.

I’m not saying it is an ultra-terrestrial in this movie, but the idea is that throughout human history whenever human beings saw something and interpreted it as being like, “Oh, I saw something. That was an angel from the bible.” Or, “That was a demon.” Or, “That was an extraterrestrial being.” “That was the Men in Black.” “That was the Mothman.” Whatever. That it’s actually always the same thing. In his case, he was arguing that it was this thing called an ultraterrestrial. That just basically, something that had been here among us, always manipulating the situation and everyone just seeing it differently depending on their culture. So it’s vaguely where the idea comes from. If you could imagine, there are so many species that we haven’t yet cataloged in the Amazon. Things like that. Imagine if there’s like an enormous blind spot that we just completely missed; one really big thing. Again, that’s not what’s in The Endless but it’s that idea.

I do have one very specific question. Are we meant to interpret at the end where we see the image of two cars coming into a collision, that it has anything to do with the car crash that put them there in the first place?

MOORHEAD: No.That’s an interesting one where we realized that was an unintentional thing. About 10% percent of people, they’ll kind of have that question of like, “Do they?”

When I watch Resolution andThe Endless back to back, something I had not picked up the first time was, they seem almost opposite ending moments. Resolution ends on a feeling of helplessness and being trapped and The Endless is all about breaking free. Was that intentionally designed for those two endings to be on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum?

MOORHEAD: Oh, that’s funny. I’m going to give you a yes and no. I think afterSpring, we got addicted to optimistic endings. I think we realized that we are just optimistic people and saying like, “You’re fucked no matter what” is just not our feeling about the way that life is, or at least the message that we want to put out into the world. And also, frankly, it more comes down to the construct of The Endless where, if you’re talking in really broad terms about the movie. If you’re talking about the fact that it says, “Break out of your cycle or be doomed to repeat history forever.” It seems like we should be showing what it looks like to break out of your cycle. And like, “Does that help you?” I don’t think it’s a moral as much as it’s an exploration of it. Because there are people that do enjoy it inside their cycle. I mean, the cult at the end. And you don’t even feel bad for them. A little bit, but it’s more melancholy. It’s like, “Oh. They kind of enjoy it there.” But I think that it would have been untruthful for ourselves if we’d ended it as dark as Resolution had ended.

BENSON: Yeah. It just seemed like we know, yes there is a very literal answer to the movie. And the answers in the film…It may take a few viewings, but everything’s very literal and all the evidence, if you want to call it that, is there. In terms of, where’s the movie ending in the sense of the supernatural, and otherworldly, and the sci-fi aspects, and all that.

But the thing that’s definite, that’s there, that was the most important to us, was just that you’d see that there was a transformation in the interpersonal relationship between these two brothers. And that you’d see that transformation in just a really understated gesture. And that the emotional satisfaction should come from that. I think anything else beyond that, we do things stylistically to kind of like poke the mystery part of people’s brains a little bit. One example is that it’s a hard cut going out. Things like that where just like you sit there and you go, “Oh, wait. There’s another piece of the puzzle to figure out.” To think about longer. It’s things like that. But there’s definitely one answer to the sci-fi part of it.

MOORHEAD: Actually going back to your questions, I just remembered when you said, “People who have viewed the movie multiple times.” There’s something that’s an interesting thing we’ve realizes. Our movies kind of exist in what people have called a Lynchian sort of universe where just things are a little off and all of that. I hadn’t seen almost any Lynch when that comparison started, but what’s interesting is, all of the answers to the movie are, I promise you, they’re in the movie. They are there. It’s not a dream logic situation. We’re not being deliberately obtuse. We just want to tell a mystery that’s got a lot of depth to it. And we just don’t want to lay it all out on the table but they’re in there. If you think about it long enough and hard enough. And you know, you might have to take a couple of, not leaps of logic but leaps of faith that like, “Okay. That is what they meant.” Something like that. But our movies are meant to be, I guess literal. That might be the word for it. They are meant to be telling a full story.

哥哥（不需要吃饭也不需要喝水，车也不需要加油，估计电池也一直都没换新的吧）到底是个什么东西？是一种什么样的存在？结尾说弟弟figure it out，难道他早就figure it out了吗？他一直都知道自己在循环里吗，为了多活几年把弟弟带出去，但始终知道自己从未离开过循环？如果那个神秘强大的不可名状的东西想让兄弟俩在出现三个月亮之前走不出边界，永远陷入循环，没必要用照片提示弟弟去房车那里和哥哥会合吧，也许他俩一直就在循环中（给水这个情节发生了两次，兄弟俩刚会合的时候哥哥就把水给了弟弟，之后弟弟说渴，弟弟手上是没有水的，哥哥掏包，弟弟还问你干什么，哥哥又给了一次水）？未知在玩弄他俩？

每个人都活在自己的轮回里，不管你是否意识到……

看到70分钟左右的时候，我暂停了，猜测剧情往下会怎么走。后面的克苏鲁神话对我来说有些不过瘾，我更愿意看到哥哥带着弟弟走出“邪教”团体，但是在弟弟的反抗下意识到，即使离开了集体生活，自己奋力逃出了一个围城，自我感觉获得的无限可能也只是另一种轮回，可是哥哥会让年轻的弟弟明白自己为什么离开集体生活的选择，因为自由给了你无限可能的同时，也要求你自己去做努力，去寻找并实现自我价值。哥哥愿意在这种自由状态下接受现实中投靠无门、难有立锥之地的困境中轮回，也不愿意交换不知道有何用的权利来换取有保障的生活，这是为人者的尊严，是我们精神独立，人格完全的操守。

愿我们有一个机会做出这样的选择。

每个人都有自己的轮回，或短或长。在自己的轮回里挑选自己应对轮回的姿态，尽量有尊严的活着。如果有机会跳出这个轮回，跳出去看一下，或许在这个过程中才会发现什么才是对自己最重要的事。建议一直困在公司格子间的同仁能够出离一下，审视自己生活的轮回，愿你感受到得不只有悲哀。

//collider.com/the-endless-explained-interview/

一个很长的对于兄弟俩导演的采访。

导演说了很多，其中有两个事情给出了明确答复：

1. 结局是“乐观的”。

2. 最后兄弟俩驾车冲出loop的时候和镜面相撞，这件事和他们年幼时候遭遇的车祸不是一个事情。

那么影片最后的关于汽车没油了的对话，便可以理解为，车子确实快要没油了，只是因为汽车会给你一个冗余量而已（让你尽早加油）。而哥哥那句“You figured it out”只是为了表现哥哥再也不强求弟弟了。（这么多年来哥哥对弟弟都是非常强势的，影片中多次体现。）

所以其实结局是两重欢喜。第一重，他们逃离了循环；第二重，兄弟俩不再是命令和屈服的关系。尤其是第二点，导演也有在采访中暗示。

大家都想多了。但目前已有的影评中，确实有很多看似有道理的分析，但都被导演简单粗暴的定性答复否决了。这样看来这部电影其实逻辑性并不明确，你也可以说有bug。

两兄弟最后发现车没油了还能开，应该是没逃出？还有两兄弟去到一个房子时没人离开后，有个拍摄到他们的录像带怎么自动弹出了？

人类最古老最强烈的感情是恐惧

而最古老最强烈的恐惧是对未知的恐惧

霍华德●菲利普●洛夫克拉夫特

朋友之间会相对频繁地向彼此倾诉自己的感情

而兄弟姊妹则会等待一个更为方便的时机比如临终之前

无名

1 烧脑电影，片名点明主题

2 节奏太慢，会让观众失去耐心

3 很多地方莫名其妙没有解释清楚，让人看得云里雾里

4 这部电影得至少看两遍很多地方才能弄明白

5 其实人生也是电影里的无尽循环的一种

6 每个人都活在循环中

7 不知道电影里的神秘怪物到底是什么

8 剧情上的漏洞实在太多都数不过来

看到很多认真的豆友贴上了导演访谈，我认为哈，一般聪明的导演对那些娱乐周刊或者电影记者都有些降次元的优越感，尤其是那种自己写烧脑电影剧本又自己拍的。有时候导演觉得问题记者个人引导性太强，或者问题不够对他胃口（比如，问题的本身就表现出对这个电影不太理解）导演是完全不介意随口乱说两句的。这和很多成功艺术家一样，他们有时候就是会在他们认为没懂还要去报道的记着面前故意乱说几句。毕竟，电影本身才是导演试图和观众交流的本身，任何诠释都不如电影本身。换作艺术也是一样。

所有的争论都集中在兄弟俩有没有逃出轮回以及为何每批人的轮回都有自己的圈和时间线。我的理解是，本来轮回是在一个圈里的，时间也比较长，差不多十一二年左右（一个小男孩长大成人）。但有些识破轮回本质的人，为了对抗轮回的无意义以及无自主性，他们选择自杀而不是根据“神”设定的轮回节奏。一旦在一个轮回里自杀，轮回会缩短成为：知道轮回怎么回事-自杀这样一个小轮回。因此那个上吊男，本来和营地的其他人一样，轮回时间是十一二年左右（他记得小男孩来的时候的事），但因为他几次自杀行为，他的轮回越来越短 ，有了枪之后就更短了。那些无法交流的轮回小圈子，都是离开了集体，自己寻找解决方案的，他们无法与其他人再次见面的原因是他们的轮回时间变短了。

所以从这个逻辑来说，离开轮回大圈子的兄弟俩，最后撞向轮回的边缘，获得了极短的轮回时间，确实就是那开车的几秒。但是在这个极短轮回里，兄弟都得到了他们想要的东西，弟弟得到了哥哥的信任，解开了哥哥对他生活的控制；哥哥得到了弟弟的原谅和信任。这是他们原来没有的，原来的生活穷困潦倒，互相依赖的两个人矛盾不断。所以长也不一定好啊