MovieChat Forums > Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2012) Discussion > I just didn't understand ANYTHING

I just didn't understand ANYTHING


I go to the movies a lot, watched some Godard movies which left me less puzzled than this.
I came out of the cinema, without understanding anything that had happened from beginning to end...
I was lost after 10 minutes. Too many names, very few explanations.
I remember it's the first and only movie who ever made me feel like this.
I always wanted to watch it again to see if I was just on a bad day back then, but haven't found the courage yet.
Very frustrating

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so i had to read the plot in wiki to understand.. i was hoping a thiriller, but it was dissapointing, slow paced movie

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Read the book, that's what helped me, probably. I almost guarantee you'll immediately want to read the rest of the Karla trilogy, then start screaming for them to be filmed.

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You can't let your brain slip into neutral with this story a sly look at your phone and you are lost. Underneath the slow pace is a torrent of detail and menace. No dozing waiting for next chase sequence, you need to stay sharp.
I like it but you need to be in the right frame of mind I.e. Prepared .

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You can't let your brain slip into neutral with this story a sly look at your phone and you are lost. Underneath the slow pace is a torrent of detail and menace. No dozing waiting for next chase sequence, you need to stay sharp.
I like it but you need to be in the right frame of mind I.e. Prepared .


I would say you've identified a key reason why some viewers are confused when they watch TTSS. Many people nowadays are not used to staying alert and paying complete attention to every detail in a movie. In this era of feature films about comic-book characters, most movies simply do not require that kind of attention on the part of the viewer. But in TTSS, every detail is significant: every glance, every word, and every object on which the camera focuses. The story resides in the "torrent of detail" you mentioned. There is no exposition purely for the distracted or absentminded.

When I visit the cinema nowadays, which I do less and less often, I see people checking their phones throughout the movie, reading texts and writing texts, leaving the theater and coming back to their seats, eating noisy snacks, chatting with their dates/families, and so on. I have to wonder how much they even like movies, since they seem to have no respect for the movie presentation or for their fellow moviegoers.

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I can't say I came out of the cinema understanding everything but I picked up more trying not to! After all, a story that has been novelized and serialized on TV will be difficult to follow in a compressed form.

It helped that they kept going back to the Christmas party.

It is on Netflix now.

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It helps to have read the books, at least, if not the trilogy. I cannot imagine following the plot otherwise. This version is compressed but a fair rendition. I prefer the Alex Guinness version. He is the true Smiley.

For all you Smiley fans, see "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" with Richard Burton, about 1965 or so. Smiley has an appearance.

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My thoughts exactly.
The clever clogs reviewers praise it. However give me a Roger Moore Bond jumping from an Austrian mountain into the abyss, only to open a Union Jack parachute anytime!

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Maybe, I am not the right one to say anything, since I have read the novel several times, as well as watched the old BBC Mini Series with Sir Alec as Smiley also a lot of times. So I am prejudiced.
But - as at least one other contributor writes - it is rather easy to keep the characters separated from each other. This is not a BBC 'Agatha-Christie-episode' where the female characters of same age look the same, the same for male characters. It is often a greater puzzle than the issue than finding out whodunnit.
But one clue so solve the problem of flashbacks is to look at Smiley's specs. Smiley is a man of quiet living - in his world it must be some revolution to buy new specs after being fired. So look at his specs if you are in doubt wheter a scene is 'now' or in 'past'.

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I must admit after watching this I was forced to go back and read the detailed Synopsis (of this movie) on this web site in order to attempt to fill in all the gaps in my comprehension of what I'd just seen.

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A friend showed me this last night and I'm with you. The cool early 70s visuals and that helped me get through it. I think it's the slowest paced film I've ever seen yet I still had a heck of a time trying to keep up.

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Your plight is understandable. When I first watched the BBC version on DVD's, it had a list of characters and tradecraft terms like scalp hunters. I think that John le Carre expects too much from his readers. If the readers or the viewers can't keep track of all the names, they won't be able to follow the story. Also, le Carre uses too many unfamiliar tradecraft terms, like the Russian Rules in Smiley's People. The same difficulty appears in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The viewers are informed only at the end of the film that everything was orchestrated to protect the double agent in Berlin. The only way of making le Carre's stories comprehensible in films is to reduce the number of characters and simply the storyline.

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Interesting.

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