The Prestige (book and movie)

This was a novel by Christopher Priest which was later adapted into a movie, directed by Christopher Nolan ("Batman Begins", which I didn't like, and "Memento" , which I did).


It's not the secret. The secret is trivial. It's how you use the secret that's important. It's how the secret contorts your life around it. It's how the secret affects those around you. THAT matters. Deeply. That's why it doesn't matter if you know the "twist" or not. It's still a great
story. For the same reason, it doesn't matter (to the meaning of the story) that a device that works in the story might not be possible in reality.

We have two young stage magicians in Victorian England. One way or the other, they end up as bitter rivals, constantly provoking each other and spying on each other to learn the other's secrets. In the book, it starts when Borden attempts to expose Angier as a fraud (when Angier performs as a spiritualist). In the movie, the two are initially friends under the same mentor. Borden is perhaps guilty in the death of Angier's wife.

Either way, it's bound to end in tragedy.

Now add in the magic and mystique of Nikolai Tesla! It's the dawn of the modern age, and where does science begin and magic end? Which is the true performance? The man onstage, or the
man offstage? Are you watching closely? Do you see what you see or what you expect to see? Illusion, deception, obsession.

I thought the movie was a very good adaptation. It dropped most of the framing devices (with the modern-era man who finds out about the past by reading diaries and so on), but still keeping some of the diary/journal idea by having the two rivals read each other's diaries instead.

In fact, this is one of the few cases where I felt the movie version was a bit stronger!
In the book, the ending just made me go "eh? what was that? why end it that way?" (But then, I thought that about Christopher Priest's The Glamour, too.)

The movie, of course, Hollywoodized it with extra doses of drama, but that isn't always a bad thing (for a movie!). Nolan did that "end where we started, except this time the same scene means something different". Perhaps he tried a little too hard (making the movie seem pretentious or heavy-handed at times, especially the very end), but it was still excellent. I really felt for the characters, even though they were not very likeable as people. Talk about making sacrifices for your art!

Since I'd read the book first, it wasn't really a surprise. The changes weren't quite what I expected. They made the character's choices scarier, I think, and the tone as a whole was perhaps darker/more violent. And Angier's machine...I felt it made more sense for it to work (if such a thing was possible at all!) the way it did in the movie rather than the way it did in the book. It felt as if Christopher Priest wimped out on it,
and went the less troublesome path with it.

Memorable novel, memorable film!

Iconic image (movie): a bunch of Victorian top hats strewn in the woods...
(And the rows and rows of birds in cages...very unsettling. Strips the humor
away when it's birds rather than hats.)