The Prestige
Genre: Drama/Fantasy/Thriller
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine …
Director: Christopher Nolan
Release: (2006)
Christopher Nolan taps some of the heaviest hitters from his day job as the fantastically successful savior of the Batman franchise to help him out with this engrossing tale of two magicians leading each other to the edge of sanity in a perpetual game of personal and professional one-upsmanship. Christian Bale and Michael Caine are the two that follow Nolan from Batman Begins to The Prestige and, currently, back to The Dark Knight again. Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson round out the impressive central cast to this movie, though no matter how good they are (and they are good), all of them take a backseat to Nolan’s storytelling in this one.
To be fair, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan are both credited with the screenplay on this, and even that is based on a novel by Christopher Priest. But the deceptive cuts and clever unfolding of the scenes throughout the presentation of this fascinating tale make the director’s contribution stand out above all else as the rightful recipient for almost all of the praise for this film. Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to go about lavishing that praise. Nolan crafts a film with such a deftly interwoven web of secrets and reveals that, to be honest, I cannot really isolate an example of how he does it without potentially giving something away for you. I guess what I can say is that, within the context of the story (in fact, the very opening scene), Nolan brazenly tells you exactly how he is going to tell the story, continually repeats this message with no pretense whatsoever throughout, and ultimately leaves you aware of exactly what he did and how he did it – and yet still racked with plenty of enjoyably pesky questions about what exactly you just saw.
If you tried to see this in the theatres, I can imagine your frustration. This is truly a film made for the DVD medium, as I found myself rewinding, rewatching scenes in slow motion, and pausing frames several times throughout. Even then, that bastard still got me in the end. If I can say anything really negative about this film, it is that it’s listed with a run time of 130 minutes, but you really kind of need to set aside 230+ minutes for it. Aside from several pauses and rewinds, the very ending of this movie puts the entire rest of the story into such a new context that you will have no choice but to go back and watch the whole thing again.
Grading
Story: A
Acting: A
Visuals: A (Dark, excellent direction of scenes)
Originality/Innovation: N/A (based on a novel, but I’m guessing the novel is good)
Enjoyability: A
Overall: A
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