0
0
0
0
0
0
 0
 
By Nancy Taubenslag and Mauri Rosenthal
Answer: SANAA

The puzzle presents screenshots from seven films whose titles each end with the name of a city which is integral to that film’s plot. The number of screenshots equals the number of letters in the name of city (e.g., four screenshots for Troy).

Twelve of the screenshots also have captions ending in parenthesized numbers. Those images specify which letter to extract from the city name as part of the final cluing message, and the number itself is a sequence number from 1 to 12. There is one complication to the extraction: As hinted by the puzzle title/flavortext, screenshot captions, and the screenshot order, the puzzle is inspired by the film Memento, in which the action takes place in reverse chronological order. Solvers will probably note that the screenshots are also presented in reverse chronological order to the actual plot of the movie—i.e., in the series of screenshots for each movie, the final movie scenes are the first screenshots shown, and the opening movie scenes are the last screenshots. So to extract the correct letters, the solvers must take the letters of the city in reverse order (e.g., for New York, the seventh screenshot represents the letter N). As an additional hint to this, the films are presented in alphabetical order by the reversed city names.

Movies:

  1. Gangs of New York
  2. Bull Durham
  3. An American Werewolf in London
  4. Viva Las Vegas
  5. In Bruges
  6. Midnight in Paris
  7. Troy

Numbered screenshots:

  1. A (2nd screenshot from Bull Durham)
  2. N (1st screenshot from An American Werewolf in London)
  3. E (2nd screenshot from In Bruges)
  4. W (5th screenshot from Gangs of New York)
  5. D (6th screenshot from Bull Durham)
  6. A (4th screenshot from Midnight in Paris)
  7. Y (1st screenshot from Troy)
  8. I (2nd screenshot from Midnight in Paris)
  9. N (7th screenshot from Gangs of New York)
  10. O (2nd screenshot from Troy)
  11. L (8th screenshot from Viva Las Vegas)
  12. D (3rd screenshot from An American Werewolf in London)

This spells out the final cluing message A NEW DAY IN OLD. Searching for that phrase on the internet will yield the film title A New Day in Old Sana’a, so the answer is SANAA.