Always awesome: double feature night. Even when I have to drive to different theaters to accomplish it, because I’ve waited until the end of a run and am completely behind the curve of everyone else seeing the same movie and having their opinions entrenched well before I thought of planning a night out, much less presenting an otherwise stunningly coherent and insightful review of said film. Luckily, I do that with books all the time and am used to the feeling.

First, I saw The Prestige. The prestige is the part of a magician’s trick where the magic occurs. (I assume that is an actual real term, even though I’ve never heard Gob refer to it.) Reasonably, then, the movie is about the rivalry between two turn-of-the-century magicians; subtly in the background, it’s also about the rivalry between two non-fictional magicians from the same period, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. I have a feeling that the book on which the movie is based renders that second rivalry completely awesome. But it’s about a lot more than that. Revenge, chases, escapes, true love, miracles… all this, and it’s not a kissing book.

Okay, but seriously. There are solid doses of the nature of identity (which I’m beginning to believe is requisite in all fantasy/science fiction, and possibly in all fiction, full stop), obsessions, mad (but usually legitimate) science, and a non-stop series of… well, twists isn’t exactly right, because there’s not really a moment where everything changes and your understanding of the movie clicks into place and makes it a completely new movie, like twist endings usually imply, but there definitely is a non-stop series of dramatic reveals and escalations. My especial favorite theme is on the topic of whether obsession trumps identity, and the consequences of either choice.

Spoilers below the cut! For the remainder, this has made me really interested in a good biography of Tesla, and I welcome any and all discussion about the movie, because of the greatness of it. Well, I mean, it was pretty great, but the greatness I’m referring to is how discussable it is.

I worked out the two big reveals at least a little bit before I was supposed to, I think. And I’m not really convinced that Cutter was involved in the final outcome of the feud on either side, although I’ve seen internet speculation in that direction. But the final scene has me mystified. I believe I was supposed to ascribe some real significance to yet another Angier copy in yet another tank of water as Borden walked out of the burning building. I could not come up with anything, though. 1) He was dead anyway, right? 2) Why would Angiers have had two or more of those trap water tanks in the first place? (I assume he used the same one every night to kill the extraneous copy, and was more or less just waiting for the day when Borden would show up and step into the trap. Superb trap, too. I am still a little in awe of the resolve that must have taken.) 3) Am I supposed to believe that he made a new copy of himself after everything had run its course? What would the purpose have been, if so?