You make your own pie
Remember Kramer's idea about the pizza place where you make your own pizza pie? A ridiculous idea, right?
This movie IS that place.
A movie is supposed to tell a coherent, cohesive story. It doesn't matter if it's a bit convoluted, hard to understand, complicated, as long as there's only one way to interpret things. There's a weird trend where moviemakers said 'fyck it, I am tired of trying to create something' and started giving us these nonsensical, non-story movies.
This movie is just giving you the INGREDIENTS of a story and tells you to compose some kind of pizza pie out of that.
It's like a restaurant that instead of giving you a well-prepared and cooked, good, finished meal that you can eat, the cook just throws some ingredients and tools on the table and tells you to make your own meal.
What's the point of a restaurant like that, when you can just do that by going to a grocery store and then cooking a meal for yourself at home?
Yet, we accept this in movie form. "There's no story, how dare you expect ME to tell YOU a story! Didn't I present you with a plethora of lovely ingredients? Make up your own damn story!"
At least many people on these forums that see the beauty of the Emperor's clothes seem to be thinking these movies do.
Look at something like 'The Matrix'; it is 'relatively complicated', it's 'layered', it has 'philosophical elements', it makes you 'think and question things' (well, at least if you're twelve) - it's not a perfect movie, but at least it's easy to see how the story goes, what actually happens, and get a satisfaction that 'it all makes sense'.
Not so on movies like 'Shutter Island'. Everything is kept vague, because it's easier to write that way, the writer doesn't have to worry about what's real and what happens, they can just keep EVERYTHING loose, so no one can ever know what's real, then contradict every possible explanation with some scene, and you're done. Brilliant, genius movie, for the price of a cheap, plastic toy.
I guess THAT is the genius of movies like these; they slap you in the face, throw some ingredients at you and tell you to make your own damn story, and everyone pays and applauds, because they don't want to be seen as 'dumb people that didn't get it'.
Ahh, glorious, aren't, they? The Emperor wears them so well, too.