Okay, I'll bite. I can't reply to everything in the thread, but here's a review (of sorts) comparing The Prestige with The Illusionist (I like both but much prefer the former). I kind of doubt if it answers everyone's complaints satisfactorily, but hopefully it clarifies why I rate it so highly (I assumed that Pyro's confusion came from my evaluation, since by the majority of posts in this thread The Prestige doesn't seem too highly regarded).
WARNING, THIS POST CONTAINS COPIOUS SPOILERS FOR THE PRESTIGE, AND ONE (WELL-MARKED) SPOILER FOR INSOMNIA (1997).
First, I'm impressed with the manifold tricks used to engage the viewer in The Prestige. The diaries, the many kinds of doubles, multi-level ruminations on what's real and what isn't, the special effects and nonlinear plot: Nolan's uses many narrative and visual devices to fool the audience and he wants you to know it. In The Prestige, the bag of tricks isn't just the invisible strings and levers that operate the props for our amusement, it is part of the act.
Sedai called Nolan's movie "studied, and mechanical" (in comparison to the Illusionist). Perhaps it seems so but I disagree. The Prestige does two things expertly, and each one makes the other stronger: it uses, and simultaneously is about the craft of deception, abandoning sympathetic characters and love stories, except for the exigencies of the plot. There is a love story of sorts here, but it's between performers and their single minded passion for revealing each other's artifice, so it doesn't really give you a resolution to feel happy about afterwords (unless you hate the movie in which case you would be happy that it is over).
As for the style, I wouldn't call the movie "mechanical", but rather "workmanlike". If the Illusionist is a movie about a man who fools people using lovely images (and uses lovely images while fooling us), The Prestige goes one further, foregrounding the drab-textured backstage and the streets of London and warping the act so far that it's no longer possible to distinguish between what is and isn't part of the show. The twist here adds more layers of deception, mixing both real (Angier's transported man) and fake (Borden's transported man) magic, and also trying to make things that are in fact (in the story) real magic look fake while making fake magic look like the real thing (and considering how far revealing your technique and tools can further the deception). It also goes further in making the magician's "real" lives a part of the act. In The Illusionist what is real and what is fake is pretty clear at the end, in The Prestige it is much more complicated.
Certain junctures in the story that may or may not have come about intentionally feed the obsession (the knot. Did Borden know and if so which Borden?). While The Illusionist takes great care to explain motivations, The Prestige takes a much harder path. It tries to wrap you up in the rivalry between the characters (successfully, for me anyway) while making their motivation the hardest element to smoke out, because after a point even they no longer know why they started or why they're continuing the rivalry. In a way this is similar with the muddling of intention done in the original Insomnia (which is oddly one of the things Nolan downplayed in his remake [don't read the rest of this paragraph if you don't want Insomnia spoiled]), where at the end you're left to ponder whether Stellan Skarsgard shot his partner on purpose and whether he even knows anymore. I liked the original Insomnia better than The Prestige, by the way.
Tesla vs. Edison. I loved this back ground. It says that yeah, all the main drama in the story is basically just a bunch of pranks between two pompous showmen, but these pranks are reflected in the much larger and more important war of the currents between Westinghouse-backed Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. I like this part because it very economically tells an interesting side story that also fleshes out the milieu, and I appreciate how it portrays Edison as some unseen gangster-scientist, obsessed with deception much like the magicians and perhaps for similarly selfish reasons. Particularly amusing is the theatricality of the scene where Edison (?) plants members in the audience at the London expo to discredit Tesla. Some people complained that the fantasy aspect of this side story became too far fetched at the end, but it is interesting in that Tesla really was a genius and did claim all sorts of bizarre and mystical experimental results later in his life (and died in relative obscurity, though his alternating current did eventually win out over Edison's direct current) and makes it a good science fiction movie too. Yet another reflection of this theme of blurring reality and imagination, but this time in the real-life story of a great scientist whose work changed lives, but who at the same time propounds all these bizarre fanciful theories.
So yeah, I really dug this movie. I watched it 3 and a half times and don't regret any of the time I invested in it. Not that I'm that interested in the debate over who is and isn't an auteur, but as a brief note, I read the Priest novel after seeing the movie, and thought all of Nolan's changes were improvements. And I liked the book too.
Last edited by linespalsy; 08-04-07 at 10:02 PM.
Reply to Topic
