Award-winning actors Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson star in THE PRESTIGE, the twisting, turning story that, like all great magic tricks, stays with you. Two young, passionate magicians, Robert Angier (Jackman), a charismatic showman, and Alfred Borden (Bale), a gifted illusionist, are friends and partners until one fateful night when their biggest trick goes terribly wrong. Now the bitterest of enemies, they will stop at nothing to learn each other's secrets. As their rivalry escalates into a total obsession full of deceit and sabotage, they risk everything to become the greatest magician of all time. But nothing is as it seems, so watch closely. And be prepared to watch it again and again.

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::AMAZON REVIEWS::

A classic
One of the best movies I have seen in the past few years. The story, the acting, the visualization and the imagination makes this an instant classic.

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The Prestige
In the end of the Nineteenth Century, in London, Robert Angier, his beloved wife Julia McCullough and Alfred Borden are friends and assistants of a magician. When Julia accidentally dies during a performance, Robert blames Alfred for her death and they become enemies. Both become famous and rival magicians, sabotaging the performance of the other on the stage. When Alfred performs a successful trick, Robert becomes obsessed trying to disclose the secret of his competitor with tragic consequences. The work is epic in sweep, beautifully filmed, and strongly acted. A movie with the power of becoming a cult classic, ''The Prestige'' is magical. In every sense of the word.

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The Prestige
The Prestige is a work of film making genius. The plot has so many twists and turns it will successfully keep you guessing until the end. Every time the ending of the story seems clear another twist will muddle it up again. The Prestige is written by Jonathan Nolan and directed by Christopher Nolan. These brothers team up on this project along with Christopher's wife Emma Thomas, as a producer, to create a masterpiece of immense proportions.

The Prestige is an entrancing story of two friends turned enemies. In this thrilling story two magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, battle for one another's power and fame, often allowing their obsession to get the best of them. Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Bale) begin the movie as friends working a mutual magic act as plants in the audience, but after Angier's wife dies in one of the tricks, he blames Borden and a bitter rivalry is born.

The acting by Jackman and Bale is superb, as is that of Scarlet Johansson as the charming Olivia Wenscombe. Olivia is a beautiful assistant haired by Angier to help him one up Borden. After Borden opens a new act called the transporter man, where he appears to disappear and immediately reappear across stage, Angier sends Olivia to spy on Borden and discover his secret. This secret becomes the object of an even greater obsession. An obsession that began with seeking revenge for his wife's death quickly turns to an obsession to simply destroy Borden, which will ultimately destroy him as well. Angier goes as far at one point to tell Olivia that he doesn't care about his wife, he only wants Borden's secrets.

These two men feed off each other throughout the entire movie constantly trying to outdo the other, going as far as broken legs, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, and ultimately murder. Nothing is too extreme for these men when revenge is within their reach. Jackman and Bale make this rivalry so intense and believable you're left trying to figure out even who is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy." While this is the least of the questions that must be answered through the course of this movie, it keeps you guessing just as well as the rest and the answer isn't revealed until the last few minutes of the movie.

While this is a wonderful story line for a movie, some of the morals taught through the events of the movie are not very good. The major themes of this movie are revenge, deception, and competition. None of which are themes that I would want running through my life or the lives of those I care about. The saddest part about this story is that these lives of revenge, and deceit were chosen by the men that they consumed. I did however like that the consequences of these choices are shown in the end, but unfortunately, one of these "bad guys" gets off clean and gets his life back, for the most part.

Much like the great magic tricks shown by these two men, The Prestige will have you watching it over and over, trying to spot how they were able to pull off the elaborate tricks that are the prestige of this wonderful movie.

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An excellent adaptation of a superb novel
At the end of the 19th Century, two stage magicians working in London become bitter rivals: Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman), performing under the name 'The Great Danton', and Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale), known as 'The Professor'. They each seek to upstage the other, and when Borden develops a seemingly impossible trick that has him apparently teleporting across the stage in a second, Angier becomes obsessed with finding out how he did it, an obsession that leads him to Colorado and a meeting with a man named Nikola Tesla...

The Prestige, released in 2006, is an adaptation of the excellent Christopher Priest novel of the same name, directed by Christopher Nolan of Memento and Batman Begins fame (his subsequent project to this movie would be The Dark Knight) and sharing several cast and crew with the comic book movies, including Christian Bale and Michael Caine. The Prestige is a superb film which may actually be the finest translation of a work of literature to the screen that I've ever seen. The film is incredibly faithful to the themes and spirit of the novel, but not slavishly so. Ideas from the book that would not work well on-screen have been jettisoned, whilst the novel's modern-day framing device has been removed and replaced with a new one that focuses the story much more closely on the rivalry between Borden and Angier. At the same time, the novel's conceit of taking place entirely through the pages of the two men's diaries is actually translated successfully to the screen, and the changes made to the central twist of the novel actually make the idea even more disturbing and horrific than in the novel. As with the novel, upon finishing the film the viewer may be tempted to immediately watch it again in full knowledge of the secrets revealed at the end, whereupon it turns into a different movie.

The film's success is built around its two protagonists. Bale and Jackman turn in supremely accomplished performances (the latter possibly in a career-best performance), each having to play a complex, driven character each of whom is carrying weighty secrets and mysteries. Their escalating rivalry is particularly well-handled. Some may feel that the two characters are too obsessed with their rivalry and we don't see many other facets of their personalities, but given that the entire movie is driven by their rivalry, this is understandable. The supporting cast is also excellent, particularly Michael Caine as Angier's assistant, Cutter, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia and the curiously effective partnership of David Bowie (yes, that David Bowie) as Tesla and Andy Serkis as his helper, Alley. In fact, it feels like there's a whole other movie Nolan could go and make about Nikola Tesla that would be as fascinating to watch.

Nolan's direction, having to handle a complex, non-linear narrative and not lose the audience in confusion, is very good. At one point Olivia tells us that once you know the secret of the trick, it becomes rather obvious, and the film is like that. Rewatching the movie, it's almost incredible that you missed all the (in retrospect, obvious) clues pointing to what the truth of the story is. This is where the real success of the movie lies. Most of Priest's novels have a moment which is known as the 'Priest Effect', where the reader feels a trapdoor has opened beneath their feet and they realise everything they thought they knew was not only wrong, but perhaps never existed in the first place. The idea that this could be translated to cinema seems unthinkable, but Nolan delivers it here with considerable success. This is a movie where the rules are fluid and shift, but once you know what is going on, it all makes sense.

The Prestige (*****) is a most accomplished film, well-paced and dramatic, with a tremendous sense of mystery. It is a puzzle box of a story where all the pieces fit together satisfyingly at the end, and rewards repeated viewing. It is available on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

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#20 on the List of My 20 Favorite Films of the 2000s
Christopher Nolan is my probably favorite filmmaker. I know, I know: join the club, right? Still, if I were hard-pressed to choose a "director of the decade," Christopher Nolan would definitely be the guy for the 2000s, with Quentin Tarantino taking the prize for the 1990s. The thing about Nolan is, like Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson, he's one of those rare auteurs whose every film, by my humble estimation, qualifies as good, and in most cases, downright great.

Ever since Nolan got his foot in the door with Following and then broke down the door and stormed the house of success with Memento, he's been on a roll; and as I sit here, writing this, on New Year's Day, there looks to be no end in sight.

To wit: I could not be more excited about Inception. The trailer I saw a week ago, on Christmas Day, in front of Sherlock Holmes, got me pumped more than any other trailer that I've seen for any other upcoming 2010 film. The music in the trailer (that ominous Hanz Zimmer cue), the apparent Matrix-like concept of the film, and the stable of acting talent Nolan has assembled for this go-round all have me majorly psyched.

We're not here to talk about Inception, however. We're here to talk about another Nolan film, The Prestige. When I first saw the well-executed, two-and-a-half-minute trailer for The Prestige back in the day, that trailer had me about as psyched as I am now for Inception. And yet when I sat through the actual two-hour movie of The Prestige for the first time, I have to admit: I was a tad underwhelmed. I felt a little let down from all the hype in my head..

I think this is because the trailer had my brain going in the wrong direction. At the end of the day, I'm more a Ray Bradbury/Stephen King kind of guy than I am an Ernest Hemingway kind of guy. While I think contemporary realism often makes for more compelling human stories, there is still a fundamental part of me that has a predisposition toward stories that feature some element of the fantastic. And so because I am a gullible Gus, because I have a bias toward belief, as opposed to skepticism, the trailer for The Prestige had me thinking there was a supernatural element to the film, that perhaps Christian Bale's character had made some sorcerer's deal with the Devil that enabled him to perform what Hugh Jackman's character called "the greatest magic trick he had ever seen."

Such is the power of prestidigitation, sleight of hand, the art of illusions. "This man can actually do what magicians pretend to do," Michael Caine's character could be heard saying in the trailer (in reference, I mistakenly thought, to Bale's character.) "I know what you really are!" Bale's love interest could be heard gasping. Demons and sorcery, black magic, "real magic:" I guess I quite dumbly expected these things to figure into the final film somehow.

But what Christopher Nolan had in mind as "real magic" was something very different. It makes me think of that famous quote from the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, the one that goes, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Based on a novel by Christopher Priest, The Prestige is one of those mystery thrillers with a clever twist ending. Not to be outdone by The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense, it actually boasts two twists: one involving Bale's character, and one involving Jackman's character. While the one involving Bale's character is sheer brilliance, one of the coolest O'Henry twists in all of movie history, I dare say, I was not as big a fan of the one involving Jackman's character. It felt like the filmmakers compounded too many twists, one on top of another, into the same movie, when one solid, seismic twist would have been effective enough. I don't want to give too much away here, in case you haven't seen the film, so I'll try to keep this as vague as possible, suffice it to say, that there is indeed an element of the fantastic, or the extraordinary, to the film ... but that element is purely a science fiction element, and not a supernatural element, as my wild fan boy's imagination had led me to believe.

Now you would think science fiction would make a movie twist more believable, but in this case I felt like the science fiction was of a nature that might better be termed "sci-fi." In other words, I had trouble suspending my disbelief when confronted with it. It did not seem grounded in any sort of realistic hard science. And for that reason, upon my first viewing of the film, the second twist really strained credulity, and to me, undermined what was otherwise a perfectly plausible story.

I was also not a fan of another earlier plot development involving a character who bears a miraculous resemblance to another character in the film. I thought it was just too, too convenient, that this stage musician in desperate need of a look-a-like just so happened to find one wandering around in turn-of-the-century London. Then again, Charles Dickens used a similar plot contrivance in A Tale of Two Cities, didn't he?

The second time I saw The Prestige, I knew exactly what to expect in terms of plot twists, so I was able to accept those weak plot points at face value and augur deeper into the ice to where there was a whole underground ocean of themes: themes skillfully submerged in the narrative of this evocative period piece, themes of obsession and duality and identity as artists and human beings. Taken as metaphors, the plot twists actually add a layer of complex beauty to Nolan's work of tragedy.

At its heart, The Prestige is a movie about creative people, conjurers of art who compete with each other and are ultimately consumed by personal jealousy, petty professional rivalry, and their own dark, dysfunctional relationship with both the world around them and their own fractured selves. Christian Bale as Alfred Borden is "The Professor," the serious craftsman who lives a life so supremely dedicated to true uncompromising art that it costs him a great deal in the end. "A real magician," he insists, "tries to invent something new that other magicians scratch their heads over." Hugh Jackman as Robert Angiers is "The Great Danton," the more audience-friendly showman who kills a little piece of himself every night he goes up on stage in front of a big crowd: baring his soul, as it were, to the audience, losing a little piece of himself to the crowd, over and over again, as if it were trapped in some unstoppable copy machine. Eventually there is no soul left in him at all, just a bunch of facsimiles of the soul he once possessed, dead-leaf echoes of the person he once was, floating ethereally in a basement of broken dreams.

I like the moody, minimalistic music of The Prestige, and I love its cinematography, and its use of voice-overs. In that respect, it almost reminds me of The Thin Red Line, my second favorite film from another bygone decade, the 1990s. All in all, Nolan has spearheaded a pretty masterful production here, with top-notch performances coming in across the boards from all the actors. Jackman is in especially good form for someone whose body of work as an actor was, up until this point, not exactly begging for him to be taken seriously (don't get me wrong: as Wolverine, he was the best part of the X-Men movies, but those were just silly gay comic book movies, and other than that, the only things I knew him for were Swordfish and Van Helsing, neither of which were memorable flicks, or even all that good as flicks, if I recall.)

The Prestige is set during a time of great invention, when inspired geniuses like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were fishing out of humankind's collective unconscious all sorts of crazy, trippy ideas for things, not the least of which was the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb. Who knows what inventions of theirs might have been lost to history, having never made it past the prototype stage?

The Prestige is a movie of ideas, maybe a few too many of them at times, but if you can suspend your disbelief and watch closely ("Are you watching closely?"), you might find it a richly rewarding movie experience, as I do. In sum, I highly encourage you to put this one in your Netflix queue, if you haven't already seen it. Hell, even if you have already seen it, it just might merit a second viewing.

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