True to its premise

Rating: 7/10 (27 March 2016)

"The closer you look, the less you see." The four magicians we are watching for most of the movie are themselves a sleight-of-hand for the real 'hero', and do their jobs well. Going on about the lack of their characters' development misses the point, since they are supposed to be 'the smartest guys in the room' and have nowhere further to go, or so they think. Their comeuppance is combined with their reward once the game is done. The hand inside their glove is himself apparently a servant in some fashion of the Eye, a secret society dedicated to magic and the sense of wonder (as well as some degree of social justice) which we never otherwise see. The central premise of the movie is stated at the end, but developed throughout. "You know how I feel about resolution and logic." The speaker doesn't care for them much, at times. "Some things are best left unexplained." The sense of wonder that the movie is trying to defend defies explanation, to the point where the explainers are treated as villains. In this case the real hero's enemies are also enemies of the Eye, the debunkers and explainers, the greedy plutocrats, and he is serving himself while serving them. If there is a flaw in the finale of the show it is in the failure to make this clearer, and I don't think it would have taken much, even less than they showed. The meaning of the carousel, if there is a meaning, is especially obscure (maybe if they'd shown it, eye-like, from above?). Making things clearer, i.e., 'resolution and logic', is not the point of the story, and it would have helped the movie if it had been less faithful to the story itself.