A recent example is Conclave, which had an ending that felt very rushed and not really consistent with the tone of the rest of the film. I left feeling quite disappointed despite the majority of the film being one of the best I have seen. Another film I saw recently with almost the opposite problem was The Prestige, which I feel shows far too much of its big twist hand throughout the film and has an extremely predictable ending as a result. I think the thematic idea of the twist is very clever but it almost underestimates the ability of the audience to follow along. Although, having said that, there are seemingly a lot of very stupid or distracted people out there who had no idea what was coming and think it’s a masterpiece so maybe it was made for them and not me.
I think that’s intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.
“You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you… then you got to see something really special.”
It’s hammered home that the secret isn’t interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.
It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn’t buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.
It’s definitely intentionally setup in such a way that the thought enters, and then exits, the audience’s mind at least once - as all great twists and reveals are. The best mysteries are always the ones that give you the solution, but do so in a way that make you second-guess your intuition and instead follow a bunch of red herrings and completely unrelated events down a different rabbit hole that ultimately lead to the wrong conclusion. My problem with The Prestige is that it repeatedly gives you the solution again and again throughout the entire film in an almost taunting/mocking fashion that insults the intelligence of anyone who figured it out, with the idea being that anyone who hasn’t will be completely shocked at the end when they see the montage of how many times they were presented with the answer. It’s so fixated with setting up the biggest “gottem” moment ever at the end that it doesn’t even try to re-engage the viewer like myself with the mystery. Your comparison to the bird trick scene with the young boy is quite accurate in a sense, because Nolan is sort of like the magician just going “oh well, you figured it out…don’t really care though because everyone else is dumb enough to believe me and think I’m a genius”. That attitude is what holds it back from being a truly great film.
A recent example is Conclave, which had an ending that felt very rushed and not really consistent with the tone of the rest of the film. I left feeling quite disappointed despite the majority of the film being one of the best I have seen. Another film I saw recently with almost the opposite problem was The Prestige, which I feel shows far too much of its big twist hand throughout the film and has an extremely predictable ending as a result. I think the thematic idea of the twist is very clever but it almost underestimates the ability of the audience to follow along. Although, having said that, there are seemingly a lot of very stupid or distracted people out there who had no idea what was coming and think it’s a masterpiece so maybe it was made for them and not me.
I think that’s intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.
It’s hammered home that the secret isn’t interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.
It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn’t buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.
It’s definitely intentionally setup in such a way that the thought enters, and then exits, the audience’s mind at least once - as all great twists and reveals are. The best mysteries are always the ones that give you the solution, but do so in a way that make you second-guess your intuition and instead follow a bunch of red herrings and completely unrelated events down a different rabbit hole that ultimately lead to the wrong conclusion. My problem with The Prestige is that it repeatedly gives you the solution again and again throughout the entire film in an almost taunting/mocking fashion that insults the intelligence of anyone who figured it out, with the idea being that anyone who hasn’t will be completely shocked at the end when they see the montage of how many times they were presented with the answer. It’s so fixated with setting up the biggest “gottem” moment ever at the end that it doesn’t even try to re-engage the viewer like myself with the mystery. Your comparison to the bird trick scene with the young boy is quite accurate in a sense, because Nolan is sort of like the magician just going “oh well, you figured it out…don’t really care though because everyone else is dumb enough to believe me and think I’m a genius”. That attitude is what holds it back from being a truly great film.