The Prestige (Movie-Strut) Spoilers
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
Who saw this and what was your opinion of the big reveal at the end (both of 'em)?
Comments
For real, the few people I know who saw it also figured it out pretty early. It would have been better if they'd dropped fewer hints.
The Bale brothers reveal was perhaps slightly better done in that they didn't spend half the movie pointing it out and I guess credit to them for keeping it simple but I don't think I've ever seen a worse fake moustache than the one Bale was sporting and the whole we bot loved one woman bullshit was painful.
I haven't read the book so I don't know whether this is a problem with the original story or whether the clumsy reveal is in a bad adaption for the screen
Oh yeah, just got to say, Bowie really, really, needs to stop acting.
Apart from all that I quite enjoyed the movie.
some debate about the ending i thought they left it pretty open.
some of the discussion I read postulated the following:
what happened to Angier's original clone? (the drunk actor)
does Angier get killed by his replica when he first tests the machine? (when he shoots himself?)
did Borden use a version of Tesla's machine first? (hence his identical twin)
Borden didn't use the Tesla machine. He made it clear in the diary that got planted on Angier that Tesla was a red herring. His identical twin was really his identical twin. No David-Bowie-In-Make-Up Magic??? needed.
They never explain what happened with Angier's original "clone" (the actor).
And the first time Angier tests the Tesla machine, he gets cloned and then he kills his clone. However, from that point onwards, at some point, the "original" Angier must have ended up committing suicide and from there on, it was just clones making more clones.
And to respond to the first repliers' post: as you noted, I had noted that the Tesla Machine, indeed, worked as a cloning machine even though NOlan felt like he had to hammer this point home (just in case people didn't manage to remember it) at the very end. And I couldn't agree more - up until that point, the film basically stayed within the idea of magic being illusion (albeit well-crafted) but the introduction of a WORKING cloning machine?
I had to pause a sec and think: what the fuck? It was like there were two different movies going on - a sci-fi morality tale and a period magician melodrama. I'm open to supernatural twists ("The Sixth Sense") but this just seemed like some nutty deus ex machina type shit.