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

[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.