If you're going to create an entire universe—in six days, no less—it pays to have a set of blueprints. Enter the map, God's little crib sheet covering every corner of his vast creation, from ev...

Your Money or Your LifeStuff is bad. Just ask this movie.One of the big, underlying messages of Time Bandits is that an obsession with stuff leaves humanity soulless, dull, and possibly evil. We se...

Gilliam plays with our sense of reality in Time Bandits, careening us from one era to the next before finishing the movie up in a giant metaphor brought to life: the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness.B...

We never actually see the Most Fabulous Object in the World, mostly because it doesn't actually exist, but the dwarves sure are keen on getting it. Evil uses the idea to lure them into the Fortress...

When we first see Napoleon Bonaparte, he's sitting in a theater in the Italian town of Castiglione while the performers do their thing just for him, bombs are dropping, the French army is running r...

"Deus ex machina" literally means "god out of the machine." It's a term that refers to a moment in a narrative when you can feel the author's hand doing things arbitrarily.It's like this: imagine y...