The Prestige is the story of two dueling magicians, set at odds by the tragic circumstances of the death of Robert Angier’s (Huge Jackman) wife on stage when a trick goes wrong, a trick that Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) was responsible for. While both magicians latter become quite successful and equally capable of living a long and rewarding life within their field, they are consumed by parallel obsessions that lead them to destroy each other’s lives.
Assisting in their private war is their mutual assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johansson) who steals and spies for the two magicians she loves, hoping that when everything is over she will see at least one of them inherit some semblance of a normal life. The non-linear storytelling does a good job of showing you two broken human beings and then little by little giving you hints as to what lead them to this state. Besides the excellent performances of the two lead actors the film is graced with talent left and right, be it in the form Scarlet Johansson, Michael Cane, Rebecca Hall and even an eccentric portrayal of Nikola Tesla by David Bowie as the movies main magician, a man who’s science defies traditional explanation.
Thematically speaking it is truly a dark film, revenge deforms the two leads both physically and emotionally and takes a heavy toll on all those around them. Stage magic is presented warts and all, with doves smashed to make them disappear, tricks that may very well cause the death of whoever performs them and audiences filled with morbid thrill seekers. The most pleasant surprise is how this film deviates thematically from your average fantasy or magic film, where instead of magic and imagination representing the ultimate ideals instead it is science itself that is the ultimate trick: raw, unexplainable, full of terrible potential and consequence.
The ending itself hits like a well written H. P. Lovecraft novella, where a normal world is turned upside down by a single deviation of nature’s laws and asks us if we had access to something truly remarkable, how long would it take us to corrupt it?