8 Mind-Blowing Tricks Famous Movies Subtly Played On You
Directing your thoughts without you knowing it.
Sometimes you'll watch a great movie and, for all your adoration, the true thing that makes it great will be just out of your reach. You rewatch and rewatch until you have that eye opening moment when it all clicks. Here's hoping I can give you a few of those today.
There are countless little tricks that a director can use to make an audience subliminally more involved with their film, but were more aware of some than others; you're pumping out the sad music in a sad moment so we cry, how original; oh look, that guys dressed in black, I wonder what his role is in all this. Thankfully, creativity isn't dead and every now and then a film will come around that uses something new (or an old trick in a fresh way) to suck us into the world without us even realising.
This article will guide you through eight of these brilliant films that messed with us in the most amazing of ways. What's amazing is that some of these tricks are often shamelessly repeated by other films where the director has clearly misunderstood their initial purpose.
Number four on this list has been redone to death, but each time the trick has been used since the original has been bandwagon jumping, rather than genuinely mind-blowing.
As always, theres an obligatory spoiler warning in effect, but theyre mild at best.
Honourable Mention: The Bomb Countdown Is In Real Time - The Dark Knight Rises
Bomb countdowns are a tricky thing to balance in movies. Too short and it just feels rushed, but drag it out and you're in Goldfinger at Fort Knox territory. The unreliable countdown cliché that hasn't become tired simply because it was never awake to begin with, the only joy coming from it being the odd occasion when a film does it right and presents it in time with the rest of the action.
Some people claimed that's what The Dark Knight Rises, but it's sadly not the case. The bomb goes off after exactly that amount of time in both film and real time - but after that point its predictions are all over the shop; at one point jumping ahead the on screen time puts the explosion in the middle of Bruce's funeral.
So sadly Nolan didn't get his timing right with this one. But keep your eyes peeled throughout this list for a time when he did.