The Prestige (spoilers)

[mmcirvin]

We just saw The Prestige, thanks to the kindness of Diane and Dennis who came to look after the baby. It was a well-made, consistently clever movie, but...


I was somewhat disappointed by the movie's turn into crackpot science-fantasy in its last act. I figured out the two major twists well in advance, and was hoping against hope that I was just being taken in, that there was a third twist and the business about Tesla's functioning matter duplicator would turn out to be yet another tissue of lies. Had that happened, I'd have regarded this movie as unadulterated brilliance.

No such luck, though. The movie simply buys into the whole hermetic-science-sorcery legend surrounding Nikola Tesla, that this guy knew about secret laws of physics that were cast into obscurity by the conspiracy that destroyed his work and that nobody ever managed to independently rediscover after him. The occasional characterization of this as "real magic" in the dialogue is right: something that worked like that would be working magic, not science.

In a way it's also a betrayal of the movie's own observations about magic, that the secret of the trick is never as interesting as the trick itself. I suppose in a sympathetic reading you could interpret this as part of the point, that when our friend Angier goes for a secret that's all out of proportion to the magic he's doing, it ultimately destroys him (many times over). But that's just the old Faust legend again.

This also means that we're going to see yet another wave of interest in nonsensical legends about Tesla and his death ray and antigravity engine and communications with aliens and involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment. I suppose it'd affect me more if I were still spending a lot of time on Usenet.

Comments

[cpr94.livejournal.com]

OK, OK, it's like, this will, like, blow your minds, but, man, imagine: 3-way deathmatch: Tesla vs. Archimedes vs. Leonardo da Vinci.

Yeah.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to decide whether or not my disappointment with the ending is justified. After all, I've both enjoyed and written stories that made similar left turns into crackpot science-fantasy. It turns out that the film is based on a novel by Christopher Priest, a writer of somewhat logically loose science fiction (I've read his novel "The Inverted World", which has similar third-act trouble); had I known that I'd have had different expectations.

I think it's at least in part because of a couple of personal preoccupations of mine. First, in my own head the magic community has always been associated with a kind of joyous rationalist debunkery, typified by The Amazing Randi, and it's a little disapointing to see a movie about magic that feels the need to serve up some in-world-genuine wizardry at the end.

Second, the paranormal Tesla cult annoys the hell out of me: Tesla was both a world-changing genius and the victim of a genuine conspiracy, but he was also a raging loony whose mouth wrote some checks that bounced, and the inventions of his that we really use every day have the notable property that they work by standard electromagnetic physics, not voodoo rays. (David Bowie and Andy Serkis were great as Tesla and sidekick, though.)

The title of the movie comes from the supposed three parts of a stage illusion, as explained by the Michael Caine character at the beginning: the Pledge ("nothing up my sleeve"), the Turn (the lady sawn in two), the Prestige (the lady restored). I'm not the only critic to observe that the Prestige is actually where this movie goes wrong; it feels as if, to some extent, it stopped at the Turn.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Could it have less to do with the fantasy science and more to do with breaking trust? The movie sets you up to think it's in one genre and pulls a switch close to the end.

That annoyed me a little, but I was mainly annoyed with the editing. The story didn't seem to flow properly, and focused on the two twists in a literal manner, only lightly touching on the implications of those two twists. If the movie had been clearer about when each flashback was supposed to occur in relation to the others, and if there had been more foreshadowing about the themes of lying and self-sacrifice, I would have liked it better.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, it's interesting that Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins was also a generally solid film with a similar flaw: the Big Bad's evil plot turns out in the last act to be based on science so nonsensical that it kills suspension of disbelief. In a more typical movie about Batman, it wouldn't have been a problem at all, but this one tries to create a more solid and believable world for him to such an extent that the violation of expectations becomes jarring.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

that there was a third twist and the business about Tesla's functioning matter duplicator would turn out to be yet another tissue of lies.

Yes, that was my reaction exactly. And I think there could have been a final, more naturalistic twist that would mimic the way magic really works.

(here thru friend of friend)