Review of The Prestige (2006) by Pur__0_0__ — 21 May 2021

I just finished watching The Prestige on Amazon Prime. Recently I decided to take a look at all of Christopher Nolan's films. I have watched The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet; and now it was this film's turn. At first I was a bit skeptical of watching it because of how complicated Nolan's films are, and on top of it this one is about magicians. So that would be even more confusing. After having seen Tenet I was overestimating this film. It's nothing as complicated (though it is fairly so), and that's for a good thing.

It's funny there are three actors in this film who also played superheroes movies - Christian Bale (Batman in TDK Trilogy), Hugh Jackman (Wolverine in X-Men), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow in MCU), and out of them Scarlett Johansson hadn't even come up as Black Widow yet. And since those are the only roles I have previously seen them, it was a bit weird seeing them do basic, method acting. The only one I had seen before do multiple roles is Michael Caine (Alfred in TDK trilogy), but he's in every Nolan film I've ever watched so he doesn't count. And all their acting was actually pretty convincing.

The story is what mainly carries this film. There are two magicians who have two completely different ideas about magic. Borden is more of someone who believes in making his life more devoted towards magic, while Angier is someone who believes the charm of magic is more based on presentation. Both the magicians hold grudges against each other due to an accident which happened in the past, which is the reason they are constantly trying to outdo each other.

Seeing this film I got to learn so many magic tricks that I otherwise used to dismiss as simply being some complicated trick my tiny brain is too weak to understand. My take from this, especially from Alfred Borden, was that to understand how magic works, we have to go to the absolute basics. How something is happening, how we can convince the audience that we are doing what they are thinking and how we can do it so smoothly that no one suspects a thing.

This is something that we can say about science too, which was shown here by Nikola Tesla - what do you think is responsible behind what you see? If Edison had tried thinking it this way instead of trying to get to Tesla, he could have been considered just about as respectable while Tesla would have never been as famous as he is today. Though I didn't quite understand how exactly the whole cloning using electricity thing worked, I guess some things are better left to the viewer's imagination. The way Angier described how it feels to be cloned also left me in my imagination - what would happen if I am cloned with all the memories intact? Which one of us will be me?

Forget The Dark Knight trilogy, now this is my favourite film by Christopher Nolan. I only learnt about Hollywood movies a few years ago, which absolutely explains why I never knew about this film. But now that I do, I'm going to recommend everyone to see it once. Seeing all the tricks and, like I mentioned above, trying to figure out how to deduct an act, I also felt like becoming a magician after watching this film.