The Prestige!

"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called 'The Pledge'. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call 'The Prestige'."

This quote is all the more relevant to the making of the movie, than to the movie itself. The brilliance of Christopher Nolan lies in the fact that he has presented the movie itself as a great magic trick. The Prestige, the hardest part of the trick, is as hard to interpret as it would have been to conceive and present. The more you watch the last segment of the movie, the more interpretations you get with each time you see it, at least that's what the director intends you to. You should not be satisfied with being fooled. "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."

Among the many questions you are left pondering at the end of the movie, the one I consider the most important is "Was Borden a better magician than Angier?" My answer would be No. The director has let the viewer know the trick behind The Prestige of Borden, with no ambiguities about it, but what he has shown to be Angier's prestige is only meant to fool the viewer. And the average viewer wants to be fooled. He doesn't want to introspect anything beyond what the director(in this case, the magician) has shown him. If you have seen this movie and truly appreciate it you would prefer not to believe that the Transporter machine works, plainly because of the fact that the beauty of magic lies not in science but in clever deception, apart from the fact that a cloning machine is impossible, that too in the 1890s. Come to think of it - which magic trick used in the movie, or even otherwise employs scientific methods to achieve the means? Every magic trick is the fruit of shrewd deception on part of the trickster. Deception is the essence of magic, and is the essence of this movie, too. I do not wish to delve too much into the argumentative aspects of the movie, I just want to reaffirm my stand that a cloning machine cannot work, considering that the movie attempts to dignify the dirty tricks behind magic, and does it quite successfully. After watching this movie, one sure will develop a heightened opinion of the directorial skills of Christopher Nolan whose previous works include Memento and Batman Begins. This movie certainly is one of my all-time favourites.