Thoughts on Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige"

First, a short review: This is a good film, which in some ways improves upon the flawed novel by Christopher Priest. It's a trick film, so if you haven't read the book or seen the film, don't click past the jump!



* When Angier (Hugh Jackman) first meets Nikolai Tesla (David freakin' Bowie), Tesla demonstrates a trick in which a light bulb is powered from, apparently, nothing. The real Tesla did this trick all the time, and nobody actually knows how he did it. We do know how he lit up all the light bulbs sticking out of the ground, however, which was also a real feat by the real Tesla. He filled the entire planet with electricity!

* When Angier is using the drunk actor as a double, there's a funny scene in which Bordon (pretending that he doesn't know the actor is the double), points out that once a double is incorporated into the trick, the double has absolute power over the magician. Midkiff pointed out that once we find out what Bordon's trick actually entails, this speaks to the types of pressures they have put on each other just to keep this secret alive.

* There is a scene in which Bordon and Bordon are trying to figure out how to out-do Angier's final trick. Unlike most of the clever misdirection in the film, this seems forced. Given the nature of Bordon's trick, he could easily match or exceed Angier's "50 meters in a second!"

* It's interesting that it never occurs to Angier to let one or more of his doubles live. With just one use of the machine (and with, therefore, no murder suicide, um, death) Angier could have replicated Bordon's trick using Bordon's method as many times as he liked. Perhaps if he had known about Bordon's double at that point in the narrative, it might have occurred to him. But he might have rejected the idea out of hand: He didn't want to share applause with his actor double, so he probably did not want to share his life with himself. Actually, it's probably just as well that this didn't go to Harold Ramis territory.