Christopher Nolan has become a renowned director distinguished for making high concept films with excellent cinematography, deep stories, and intriguing twists. His name has practically become a brand or a style, not unlike Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino. Fans expect a certain quality to his movies and a level of story that piques the intellect. Though he is most known for the mind-bending Inception, or for one of the best on-screen representations of Batman, of all the movies he has made thus far, The Prestige has to be his craziest movie idea ever. It pushed the boundaries of storytelling in unexpected ways and offered a unique twist unlike any of his movies to date.
Regrettably, The Prestige is not one of Nolan’s most celebrated works. Had no one mentioned his name next to it one could easily forget he ever made it. For the average viewer, it quietly came and went. It made a little under $110 million at the global box office on a budget of $40 million and holds a score of 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Prestige followed up Nolan’s big hit Batman Begins in 2006. Made in the shadow of and in between a behemoth franchise, it is no surprise that it never received the recognition it deserved, unless the viewer was already a Nolan aficionado.
The film follows an intense competition and revenge scheme between two magicians in the late 19th Century. Christian Bale plays Alfred Borden, who is the target of Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier. In their younger days, Borden accidentally caused the death of Angier’s wife in a magic trick gone awry. Ever since, Angier has had it out to ruin Borden. The competition heats up when real bullets get involved in a gun trick, and then sabotage, and then the ultimate comeuppance.
Before The Prestige’s ending is revealed, up to that point Nolan’s movies made little waves. 2000’s Memento was his cinema breakthrough and had the original Nolan twist. In it, an amnesiac discovers his memories are filled with guilt and crime. Then came the sleepy 2002 thriller Insomniac, which had no signature reveal. Nolan then started his path to greatness with the Dark Knight Trilogy.
After Prestige, his imagination is let loose on screen in 2010’s Inception, 2014’s Interstellar, the landmark Dunkirk in 2017 and his most recent film, Tenet. Each of these movies expands filmmaking and the genre they belong to. The Dark Knight Trilogy was the quintessential superhero movie before the MCU took the reins. Inception showed audiences a whole new style of visual effects, as did Interstellar. Dunkirk was an innovative and magnificent portrayal of one of the most crucial evacuations of the Second World War. None of these, however, deliver the same awe as the Prestige.
In the Prestige, Borden comes up with a trick he calls the Transported Man. The trick is for the magician to enter a portable closet and then magically appear in a different box a vast distance away from the original location. Angier, for all his investigation and snooping, cannot for the life of him (literally) figure out how his opponent does this. He essentially spends the movie trying to outdo Borden, but always feeling lesser because he cannot figure out this one trick. He obsesses over it so much he turns to Nikola Tesla, played by the late David Bowie.
Angier and Tesla invent a machine that, in a manner of speaking, replicates the Transported Man. Angier performs the trick and calls it the Real Transported Man. This is where the crazy bursts forth. What Angier could not solve practically, he invented technologically. The Real Transported Man operates as follows: Angier steps over a plank, makes his proclamation, and then falls into a tank of water. A moment or so later, Angier reveals himself at the back of the theater (much further than Borden’s trick) to great applause.
However, the machine that Tesla made creates a copy of Angier, which means the version that fell into the water tank remains there until he drowns. It is all real. Angier willingly “murders” himself every time he does the trick. He clones himself and then murders the previous clone basically just to stick it to Borden.
The best part of it all is that in the end Borden reveals how he accomplished his trick. Simply, he worked with an accomplice – a hidden twin brother. Borden and his partner Fallon concealed the fact that they were twins and used it to their advantage on stage. Borden was performing a magic trick no different or special than any other. Angier was so blinded by his hatred and jealousy and his drive for revenge that he overlooked the simplest explanation. So much so that it drove him to murder and deceit.
Nolan has never topped such a crazy idea on screen as he did with The Prestige. Everything else afterward, though exciting and of fine quality, has never come close to the level of twisted ingenious that is found in this movie.
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