The Prestige - Spoilers

Wow, I'm amazed that anybody around here knows what the IBM and the SAM are. Sure, I went to magic conventions back in the day. I still remember a ton of what I learned from those days: I love watching the Penn & Teller Fool Us show and telling my partner what they're doing and what principle is being used. The other day on the show, a guy came out, fanned some cards in the first five seconds, and I stopped the show and said "Marked cards!" And 10 minutes later, we learned through Penn's coded response, that was the key to the illusion. (I owned the same deck many years ago.)

You know, I think it worked for story purposes, and it also showed that Michael Caine's character was capable of being much more cruel and aggressive than we had suspected. I think it's a good question as to whether any doves were really killed or not in turn-of-the-century acts; my entire knowledge of dove magic is confined to what Ian Adair did in his Encyclopedia of Dove Magic in the 1970s (and I met Ian a few times back in those days). An enormously good book. I read everything: Bobo's Coin Magic, Hugard's Card Magic, Harold Rice's Silk Magic, all that stuff. I admire Penn & Teller a lot because they really, really understand the great history of magic, which is why it's so difficult to fool them: they know everything.

I would bet that Pen & Teller dislike The Prestige for the simple reason that it has a whole lotta b******t in it. As I think the Michael Caine character says at one point: sometimes, the simplest explanation for an illusion really is the best way to go, because there's too many ways for the complex methods to fail.

BTW, the Penn & Teller show is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it for fans of magic. It's particularly gratifying for me when I just gasp and say, "holy crap, I have no idea how that was done," and Penn & Teller are equally fooled.

 

Maybe or maybe they realized "oh this is a sci-fi film using magic as its basis to perform a narrative slight of hand"

Penn has never seen it of course because he stated that it wasn't "his kind of film".

 

I think the best science fiction has to be grounded in reality, or else you risk the audience not wanting to believe what's happening. The Prestige had a little too much "WTF???!!!" for me.

 

I get it. Makes sense. For me the grounding was the setting and using a real historical figure and rivalry (between Edison and Tesla) as those touch points but it's not going to work for everyone. I also loved the parallel between Edison and Tesla and Angier and Borden--a very similar dynamic where Borden is the Tesla of the show. A greater technician but a lesser showman. Although it's even more incredible in some sense because of the ending, I always was reminded of Pal's "The Time Machine" by "The Prestige". It's the contradiction between this technology that allows someone to travel through time in the era of Jack The Ripper that made it fascinating (and a precursor to a degree to Steam Punk along with The Wild, Wild West") to me in much the same way as that contradiction between a more primitive time and outrageous technology that isn't of its time. On a side note, I always liked Nicholas Meyer's "Time After Time" for some of the same reasons--putting characters into impossible situations where they are out of their natural environment and seeing what they do.

 

I'm a big fan of Somewhere in Time -- a movie where the time travel essentially happens through magic and belief -- but I also really liked Time After Time, a movie where the time travel happened through a scientific machine. In both cases, it was grounded enough in reality that I believed the story and liked the characters. The Prestige... not so much.

 

Richard Matheson "Bid Time Return" was a much better book than the film, usually the case with novels.

 

So at what point did the two Borden's become Borden and Fallon and pretend to be only one Borden? Borden spots the trick of the Chinese stage magician (pretending to be an old frail man), but is that because he and his twin are already "living the trick" as he says, or is that what inspired Borden to get his own engineer Fallon in aid of his stage show?

 

Probably since they were kids.

 

I always thought the Chinese man was the inspiration.