The Prestige – My first review on PFC
Hello every one,
First of all thanks to Oz for inviting me to write on PFC, Thanks to Karthik Krishnan for introducing me to PFC. Here is my first review on PFC hope u guys like it
The prestige is a brilliant film that portrays rivalry between two great magicians, who are willing to do any thing to learn each others tricks. Before I start reviewing why “The Prestige” is such a brilliant film I would like to share my experience how I enlightened my self about Christopher Nolan. Last year some time i was watching “Ghajini” (Tamil Remake of Memento) i thought it was ok, lot of people told me that the original version was awesome so i rented Memento. after first 10 or 15 min I was like WTF is going on? I couldn’t understand a bit so i started all over again and after half hour into the movie I was thought how in the hell some one could come up with that screenplay? I was totally blown out by it and Guy Pearce he was just awesome. After finishing the movie i started watching bonus features on DVD which was great too. It was his brother Jonathan Nolan’s short story(”Memento Mori”) and both of them worked together on the screenplay which is just brilliant. I saw his next movie “Insomnia” which was great too. I’m not a big fan of superhero movies but a blockbuster employee convinced me that i have to watch “Batman Begins” I thought what the hell lemme take a chance with this one (I’m very picky about the kinda of movies that i watch). After watching “Batman Begins” I was totally hooked on to Micheal Caine(Micheal caine’s dialogues were superb) and Christian Bale they were just awesome, at this point i rate Christopher Nolan as my second favourite director after the great Scorsese.
Back to “The Prestige” it starts with Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) performing a trick and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) spying to find out secret behind the trick but the trick goes wrong and Angier gets killed in the mishap, court orders death penalty to Alfred. while in jail a surprise guest visits Alfred and asks him to sell all his tricks to Lord Coldwell during the visit this guest leaves Angier’s Journal with Alfred. What follows next is journey of both Alfred and Angier together into past and future. Screenplay is very interesting as movie cuts back and forth(Its like playing Hide and Seek). I was confused for the first time when saw it in theater but after watching it again on DVD i had all my questions answered. Screenplay does play an important role on how characters progress and some times u will be playing guessing game as who is who?. I don’t want to reveal the whole story. On the whole Christopher Nolan does an excellent job in confusing audience(after your first viewing u feel like u want to watch it again) with excellent screenplay. After this one i think that he is the Master of Screenplay.
Hugh Jackman was great as an obsessive magician who would do anything to steal great tricks and present them in his own style. This is Christian Bale’s second movie with Christopher Nolan he was excellent as alfred ( Bale and Nolan have started to work on batman sequel “The Dark Knight”). My Favourite actor of the film was Micheal Caine he is just mind blowing as cutter, I think actors like Caine,Jack Nicholson, De niro and Pacino bring a certain amount of grace to what ever they do. Production of the movie was great too, settings,Cinematography, Back ground music and every thing is just perfect and great.
I would recommend this movie to everyone but u have to be patient. My rating is 8/10
Here is IMDB linkhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/
Here are some of the quotes from the movie
Cutter: Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called “The Pledge”; The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”; The magician makes his ordinary some thing do something extraordinary. Now if you’re looking for the secret… you won’t find it, that’s why there’s a third act called, “The Prestige”; this is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.
Cutter: Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know the secret… You want to be fooled.
Sarah: No more lies. No more secrets
Alfred Borden: Secrets are my life.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
should be getting this in the mail next week.. heard a lot of good things about it. another magician movie i thoroughly enjoyed was “the illusionist” starring ed norton (this guy is too awesome) and jessica “my ass is a 20 on a scale of 1 to 10″ biel.
Hi Varun, yes this film is BRILLIANT!!
I remember I was totaly engrossed when I saw it… infact my short attention span didnt wander at all.
Had zilch expectations (which is always a good thing anyway) but had no idea i’d enjoy it that much.
Story, performances and the whole atmosphere was bang on!
Nice to see a post on it here…
Do you reckon some of our hindi directors might seek inspiration from this??:-?
Can’t wait for the dvd.
And Striker, yup, Edward is awesome and HUGELY underrated man!
Welcome aboard Varun. And thanks for picking The Prestige for your first post. On a personal note, this was yet another one of my posts that never happened. That said, if you’re really impressed by Memento and Insomnia, and consider yourself a fan of Chris Nolan movies – you MUST watch Following. That was Nolan before he became popular. The movie is an epitome of his passion for cinema. Enough said. And if you like Bale – don’t miss The Machinist. A very abstract kind of a movie – but Bale, man, what a man!!
Varun,
Cutter’s monologue of the three parts of magic tricks in the begining and in the end of the movie is the only thing that creates the “final point to the story”.
I am not sure if you have seen Alejandro Jodorowsky’s underground cult classic El Topo (1970) but the starting and closing scenes of the movies are exactle similar making a sense of “Full Circle” to the given story and the same strategy has been used in the Prestige.
The monologue’s presence in the start and the end makes a full circle. Prestige is one of my “see before you die” movies list.
WB: I own a DVD of Following. In an ahr and 10 minutes Nolan creates three connected twists. Did you find any similarities with Farhan Akhtar’s “change” to Don-the chase begins again?
// Jateen, now that you’ve mentioned it – the manipulation – yes, PERHAPS. Which is probably why I had it all figured when I watched Don. But, mate, we have already given too much away – our comments already contain enough spoilers for those who haven’t watched Following yet. Don’t you think? ;)
ya man you have got to hand it to Nolan who has created such a master piece of a movie and simply amazes you with his twists and turns…
The performances as well by Jackman , Bale and Caine are topclass…
I was literally confused in rthe end with the revelation and it took me some time to finally swallow the shocker of an ending that nolan created in this movie…
I would love to watch Memento!!!Also am eagerly awaiting the Dark Knight
hey.. i watched prestige recently too n loved it..
now wat u mentioned bout memento and ur similar experiences of confusion… well.. i think a film maker somewhere fails if ur audience have to go back and watch a movie again to understand it. u being a film enthusiast.. u wil probably take the effort.. but for a normal movie goer lets say lay man its pretty disappointing or irritating to sit there n wonder wtf is happenin..:-?
it’s the directors best work after MEMENTO and following – imsomnia was a miss…
BATMAN BEGINS was GOOOOOOOOOOOD!
and CHRISTIAN BALE rocks…
they will be back together for DARK KNIGHT – next in the BATMAN series with HEATH LEDGER!
The illusionist – 6.5/10 with very predictable ending but you just had to see how it pans out in the end..Paul Giamatti and Ed norton were amazing. Jessica biel couldn’t act!
The prestige was great. 8/10 is a well deserved score. Chris nolan, darren aronofsky and David fincher are the three most promising young directors!!! I’m excited that these guys will continue to make movies for few more decades :D
Varun,
Welcome on-board and thank u 4 a review of a Hollywood movie,
a good one. worth your time, I would say! Nolan knows how to present his movies.
Guys, Thanks a lot for Positive responses,
@WB I have seen machinist I liked it too, I watched most of Chris Nolan and Chris Bale’s movies in span of week.
Edward Norton is this genereation’s De Niro i think he will be a legend in comming years. I liked his performance in American History X. I have seen Illusionist I liked 3/4 th of the movie but after that i was lost i didnt know exactly wats goin on?
@Vidya Reddy – I was eager to watch the memento so i wanted to know what was going on? but i didnt get hold of things. I Feel if i would have watched it for another 30 mins then things would have been easy to understand.
another recent gem with ed norton.. “the painted veil”. a class of a movie, this! his chemistry (or should i say, lack thereof) with naomi watts is really well-portrayed.. not to mention the visuals.. wowww the visuals!
Christopher Nolan is a fantastic director and his style perfectly merges with the theme of this
movie : Self-Destructive Obsession.
Looking at his previous movies Memento and Insomnia, one can see the most prevailing of character traits is obsession.
loved this movie.. caine is caine as usual. simply brilliant. bale and jackman are top notch themselves. was almost expecting another twist at the end. might watch it again tonight..
Hello everyone, I have been searching the internet to try and find out more info about it. I saw it in the theater when it came out and recently saw it again on DVD. What I have been trying to find an answer for (and there is a spoiler alert in my question so if you haven’t seen it please don’t read on) is what was the secret that Sarah was going to tell Olivia before she died? Did she know about her husband sharing a life with his twin? That is the only secret I can think of but it never explains what it was. If anyone has any ideas please let me know. Thanks