Movie Review – The Prestige (Magic, Obsession, and Tragic Fate)

In Christopher Nolan’s movie, two magicians, Angie and Borden, are obsessed with competition and revenge, leading them to make increasingly extreme choices that ultimately lead to a tragic end. Through the medium of magic, the movie explores human desires and the destruction they cause.

 

“Prestige” has a dictionary meaning of prestige and fame. In another sense, it is the last of the three stages of magic, the highest level of deception. If you ask humans what magic is, it’s about tricking the human eye to provide entertainment, and it’s about gaining prestige and fame because you can do something that others can’t. Prestige is the most important step in magic, and it makes sense in terms of the value you can get from it. This concept is also very important in the movie, as both magicians in the movie are obsessed and compete to create their own Prestige.

 

 

Most of Christopher Nolan’s movies have a common theme. If you watch Interstellar, Dunkirk, Inception, and Memento, you can see that Christopher Nolan’s films revolve around the understanding of the past and memory. As such, it’s fundamental to his films to present two timelines in parallel. This movie also begins with two magicians, Angie and Borden, traveling back in time. Borden and Angier have a long history of clashing over their different values of magic, and the movie begins with a situation in which the feud has grown so intense that they seek revenge to bring each other down to the bottom of the heap, and Angier is accused of causing Borden’s death in an underwater escape trick and sent to prison.
The rivalry between the two becomes more than just a professional rivalry, but a personal one. It’s a combination of past hurts, misunderstandings, and a deep-seated hatred for each other. From the very beginning of the movie, we see that they are not simply competing for technical superiority in magic, but have an intense desire to deny and eliminate each other’s very existence. In the process, both men gradually lose sight of their morals and ethical limits as human beings and become obsessed only with surpassing the other. This process suggests the inherent human weaknesses of both magicians, as well as the tragedy of their times and circumstances.
As the movie moves toward its midpoint, the two magicians resort to increasingly extreme measures to keep their secrets. Angier acquires a machine that creates a duplicate of himself every time he performs a trick that causes him to disappear, while Borden has an identical twin that no one knows about, acting as his assistant through makeup and performing teleportation tricks. Accused of killing Angier, Borden actually killed one of Angier’s duplicates, and the revenge plot culminates when Borden’s twin kills the real Angier in hiding on behalf of his executed brother.
In the second half of the film, Christopher Nolan delves deeper into the characters’ inner lives, emphasizing their human flaws and the destruction they cause. In particular, he shows how blind both Borden and Angier are to the truth of what they believe, and how that blindness leads them to ruin. The fact that both men made choices that they believed to be right ultimately led to their downfall leaves a deep impression on the audience.
For a more detailed symbolic analysis of the elements, we can talk about three elements that appear in the movie. The first is the knot trick. This knot trick was performed by Angie and Borden during their collaboration, but Borden makes a mistake in the process and Angie’s lover dies. When Borden is asked if he tied the knot incorrectly, Angie is furious that he keeps saying he doesn’t know, which sets the stage for a revenge plot. Here, the knot foreshadows the twisted relationship between the two throughout the film’s narrative, and the nature of magic suggests the existence of false knots that look like knots but are actually easily untied, symbolizing that nothing is what it seems. Secondly, there is the caged bird trick. This is a trick used by both magicians to build their reputations after they became independent, and Borden’s performance of Angier’s cage trick caused him great damage. The birds here symbolize the magicians. The bird symbolizes the magicians themselves: they are trying to fly toward the ideal of magical tricks, but they are unable to overcome the cage of their own jealousy and greed, which binds them and ties them down. Furthermore, we know from the movie that birds trapped in cages actually die, and I thought that this is also a theme that suggests the tragic ending of the two magicians. Third, the underwater escape trick. Water is usually a symbol of life, but in this movie, it appears twice as a symbol of death. The act of escaping from the water symbolizes a break from the realm that is difficult for humans to defy, and the more greedy the performer becomes, the more tragic the ending. I thought that increasing the danger and scale of the magic symbolizes human greed, and water is used to instill tension and caution in the audience.

 

 

Further analysis of the characters shows that no one is innocent, not even Angier, Borden, and Cutter. The audience naturally feels that Angie and Borden are not innocent, as they both seek unethical levels of revenge against each other. Meanwhile, it’s Cutter who has been slowly fomenting the rivalry between the two. Unwilling to mediate the conflict between the two, Cutter is a money-oriented man who wants to profit from his magic. Cutter could have mediated the conflict between Borden and Angie by bringing them together before it got out of hand, but he didn’t. He betrayed Angie because he couldn’t stand the unethical way she used the cloning machine to imprison Borden and claim his daughter. The fact that Cutter was able to protect the child by stopping Angie’s revenge is just a ruse, but I think the movie also shows how opportunistic Cutter is: he is a human being who is greedy for success and money.

 

 

Based on the above analysis, I think the reason why the movie chose the theme of magic has a lot to do with the nature of magic. Magic is never magic, it is simply a trick of the human eye, which means that what is seen is not the truth. It warns us that the attachments and greed in the human heart may not be visible, but they are deeply embedded in the human mind. In the movie, Angie and Borden’s revenge is a madness fueled by their obsession with their own seemingly magical secrets. Angie’s desire to obtain a teleportation device to defeat Borden is also driven by her obsession with Borden’s traveling trick, which she believes to be magic, which in turn triggers her feelings of revenge. While Angier appears to continue his search for the truth behind the magic trick, he is actually obsessed with what he can see, and it is this obsession and greed that destroys all the relationships around him and leads to his own downfall. The film uses the playful theme of magic to suggest human desires and the tragedies that can result from them.