Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman,
Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine
A brilliant yet dark story of two
magicians gripped by a fierce competition, this 2006 drama film shuns the
separation between professional rivalry and personal vendetta, on a stage where
illusions are weapon and secrets its gunpowder. The film is an adaptation of
the 1995 novel of the same name by Christopher Priest.
Christopher Nolan shared his idea of the
novel to be made into a movie to his brother, Jonathan Nolan, after their first
collaboration in Memento. The writing process afterward took about five years
to complete. Although the final story is faithful in theme with the book,
several key points are revised by the brothers, which in turn impressed Priest,
calling it a brilliant and fascinating adaptation of the novel. Christopher
Nolan then pulled together an ensemble cast of actors who blended well with
each other and successfully drove the narrative into a sequence of pictures
that makes an audience pick and repick a side to root for.
Magic tricks have always been a thing of
fascination to me, especially the secrets behind how they are done. But though
I am not a voluntary walker of lengths just to know these secrets, if, say, a
willing magician would offer to show them to me, then I should be very willing
as well to pay attention. There’s actually a television show about this (Masked
Magician, if it rings a bell). The film then came like a Masked Magician to me:
showing me the trick, then showing me the secret behind the trick afterwards—old-timey
magic tricks. The film is set in Victorian London.
The title of the film (and as is the
novel) actually refers to one of the three acts that comprise a magic trick,
namely: the pledge, the turn, and then the prestige, in that exact order.
Cutter (Michael Caine) explains these acts in the opening sequence of the film.
These three acts are exactly what I felt
describe the movie. Christopher Nolan shows us the pledge by letting us see
the sequence of events starting from when Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and
Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) were working as planted audience of another
magician up to the incident leading to the tension between them and their
consequent one-upmanship. He shows us ordinary elements of storytelling, and at
the same time showing us a bundle of tricks—the exchange of stage illusions
between the magicians, as well as the left and right attempts of one to
sabotage the performance of the other. These made me think and think twice of
whom to expect the victor will be in the end. The growing complexity of the
illusions, especially that of Borden’s Transported Man, not only made the story
more intriguing and interesting, it also made me more eager to know what their
secrets were.
The final series of twists in the latter
part of the film is what embodies the title of the film itself. The prestige of
this whole magic trick of a movie is what gives it the darkness and the drama
it surely promised to give. Although this act should make an audience applaud
for the trick he/she has been shown, the mere resolution of the conflicts
before it was enough to make up the final act in a satisfactory note.
Aside from the grim characters magnificently acted by
Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, this movie also features an unlikely character
in Nikola Tesla, played by musician David Bowie. Tesla has been known to have
developed the usage of alternating current as a safer means of utilizing
electricity, but most of us also know that Tesla’s experiments aren’t all
widely covered in the papers around the scientific community. Cutter gives the
best description of Tesla in this movie: a wizard—a man who can actually do
what magicians pretend they can. Tesla’s role in the story turns the table
around for the two magicians and it is with the machine he built that the
grimier part of the tale starts.
Revenge, bitterness, and eventual
obsession make this movie as riveting as it is; and along with a continuous
exchange of twists from both sides, an audience is left to wonder at the end,
who is the better illusionist then?
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