The Prestige (movie and book; spoilers)

[kate_nepveu]

If you haven't seen the movie The Prestige, then you should not read the notes behind the cut. Really. However, you should know that the movie is based on a book of the same title which won a World Fantasy Award, and while events diverge a fair amount, the book's shelved in fantasy for a reason.

I finally got around to writing this up thanks to coffeeandink's

Comments

[coffeeandink]

I reread The Prestige after seeing the movie; you and Chad are remembering a couple of things wrong:

* The Borden descendant who opens the first framing narrative is in the present day (i.e., the 1990s) and is several generations removed from the feuding magicians. The feud has apparently been continued by later generations, somewhat to their bewilderment. (I can't tell whether there is an explanation for this that I missed or whether it's simply supposed to be one of those inexplicable family things.)

* The Borden child is never taken and raised by an Angier. Angier's descendant uses the machine to create a prestige of the child, which causes the child, grown, to believe he had a missing twin brother whose existence he's been able to prove in any records. Borden does take his living child away from the Angier house and then gives him up for adoption.

* Cutter actually is in the book, just in a much smaller walk-on role. I would call his role an expansion rather than a composite because I don't think he's given any functions the book allocated to other characters, he's just given new functions pertaining to the movie.

Re: drowning: Was Victorian forensics sufficiently advanced to detect signs of drowning in the lungs?

I agree with you that magic (or science) isn't intrinsically worse than conjuring; I think the statement that the performance is more interesting than the trick became paradoxically true for Angier, who was much more interested in the performance and the rivalry than in the construction of tricks. That's why he ended up *doing* what Borden more artistically faked.

[kate_nepveu]

Huh. Why does Borden give up his child?

And I have no idea about Victorian forensics, actually, either.

Someone somewhere--possibly you!--pointed out how Angier was unable to accept that it _was_ a double, which ties into what you're saying.

(And I never considered it was a message about science, either, I think both because of the characters and because of the book.)

[kate_nepveu]

Also, I forgot to say, this makes the movie a lot creepier in comparison.