Skykid wrote: Tonight I watched Now You See Me on PPTV HD (like Netflix but... free).
Shortest review possible: Mildly entertaining brain-at-half-mast-watchable utterly ridiculous illogical impossible nonsense.
But what I really want to know is what DEL can tell me about this movie. Let's hear it man.
Okay, doesn't seem like DEL wants to help me out with this, so I'm going to do my absolute best at an illuminati theory critique. Although I'm not into the whole identifying conspiracies in commercial media because I find a lot of it can be easily explained away with logic, I never close my ears 100% to any possibility, as that would be plainly ignorant.
Sometimes it seems as though there are threads of truth to some of the claims of unusual imagery in Hollywood flicks, and I must say, Now You See Me was as weird and unusual as they come. As though the entire movie was designed with an ulterior purpose that had nothing to do with it's very hard to define general plot.
Anyway, I'm going to put my tin-foil hat on and attempt to do this through DEL's eyes, in his absence. There may be spoilers.
The movie is about the power of misdirection. Its four protagonists are a hypnotist, a thief, an illusionist and a magic man. They're brought together as a group by an unkown entity who attracts their attention by leaving enormous tarot cards in their personal dwellings. These cards are Death, The Lovers, etc etc.
Once assembled they become known as The Four Horsemen.
They become a magic force for stealing from rich institutions and giving to the poor on a global scale, all the while evading police capture. We are eventually informed their not doing this by their own design, but following the carefully arranged instructions of an unkown entity. The weird thing is, their objective is never actually explained. They mention at one point that by carrying out this mission they will obtain a prize known only as 'the eye'. They don't know what it is, and the movie never explains it.
Mid-way through the film a French police detective is researching the Eye of Horus in a several books. There are some brief exchanges with another officer about what it represents, and then it never resurfaces as a talking point...?
At one point there's a CG sequence that zooms out of an enormous pyramid and through the Eye of Horus to end up on Morgan Freeman presenting his DVD. But then Morgan Freeman is interrupted during mid-filming... which makes no sense, because an opening CG sequence would be applied post production. If he was filming at the time, then it can't be a pressed DVD, meaning us seeing it at all is unnecessary.
In the end of the movie, the twist is that the greatest form of deception is to have a figure of public trust on the inside, who actually has a personal agenda and is in full control of the external carnage. In this case the individual is a police officer.
When the Four Horsemen complete their mission to decieve the entire world, incarcerate and bankrupt several people, and dissappear, they assemble in Central Park and use their Tarot cards to reveal an 'Eye' on a tree. Out of nowhere a circus merry-go-round appears in the darkness - their ultimate prize - and they all get on one by one and promptly disappear as if by magic.
There's no resolution or explanation to any of this. The relevance of The Eye's constant reference is left dangling pointlessly.
On the whole, the movie is really, really unusual. I've not seen something commercial with so many symbols and loose ends, and the theme itself is about the power of misdirection.
So, that's my tin foil hat analysis. Probably the first I've ever done on my own, and I didn't google for any of this as yet. Hope I did well DEL, please score me out of 10!
