Inception and Interstellar are arguably the two most daring movie projects that writer-director Christopher Nolan has ever undertaken. These two mega-budget sci-fi blockbusters are conceptually profound and stratospheric in equal measure, exploring ideas about time, the human unconscious, world-building, and space colonization on levels that most other filmmakers couldn’t even conceive of. Yet when it comes to classic plot twists, an earlier Christopher Nolan movie outstrips them both. The director’s 2006 sci-fi thriller The Prestige might not be celebrated in the same terms as Inception or inspire awe quite like Interstellar, but its unexpected ending is hard to top.
Before Christopher Nolan became one of Hollywood’s biggest names with his Batman sequel The Dark Knight, he made this relatively low-budget, low-key movie about magicians. It might have starred Dark Knight cast members Christian Bale and Michael Caine alongside Hugh Jackman, with Bale and Jackman in particular delivering scintillating performances in the leading roles, but The Prestige is treated, ironically, as a footnote to Nolan’s prestigious film career. The thriller is overlooked unfairly, though, since it features two of the most brilliant plot twists that Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan have ever come up with.
The Prestige’s Twins And Cloning Twists Were Mind-blowing
How The Movie Ends Takes Us By Complete Surprise
In the final moments of The Prestige, Jackman and Bale’s magicians reveal their secrets to each other – and to us, the audience – as Jackman’s character Robert Angier lies dying, mortally wounded by his adversary. What they reveal is so unexpected that it blows our minds. Firstly, Bale’s character Borden is revealed to be not one but two people, identical twins, Alfred Borden and Bernard Fallon. The Prestige’s twins continually switch places with each other, each living half of the other’s life, allowing them to perform Borden’s Transporting Man trick, in which he apparently teleports from one place to another.
Meanwhile, we already know the secret behind Angier’s version of the same trick, which involves him cloning himself using a machine built by Nikola Tesla, who’s played in The Prestige by David Bowie. But we don’t know what it “cost” Angier, as he put it, to drown himself every night so that his exact clone could appear to the audience, thus completing his trick.
We learn in the moment before Angier’s death that Jackman’s character was effectively both versions of himself performing the Transporting Man trick on stage every night, the original, replicated version of which would actually experience drowning. This shocking confirmation of the protagonist’s suffering is arguably even more harrowing than watching a flashback scene in which one of the Borden twins has to chisel the other’s fingers off so that their hands are exactly matching.
The Prestige’s Ending Makes You Want To Rewatch The Movie Immediately
It Makes You Wonder What Clues Were Hidden In Earlier Scenes
This ending to The Prestige is compellingly mind-boggling in itself, but it also makes us want to go back and watch the whole movie over again, looking for clues that the film might have left for these final twists. In fact, the trail of evidence for Borden’s twin is there if you rewatch Christian Bale’s scenes in the movie, including those featuring the engineer Bernard Fallon, who’s actually one of the Borden twins in disguise, as it turns out.
We watch The Prestige for the wonder it provides, and the satisfaction its final revelation brings, as though the movie were itself a work of magic.
What’s more, there are hints as to what Angier suffers in cloning himself onstage only to be drowned in a wooden box, in the scenes involving Nikola Tesla. When Angier asks Tesla which one of his cloned top hats is his, Tesla answers, “They’re all your hat, Mr. Angier.” He later advises Angier to destroy his cloning machine, telling him that it will bring anyone who uses it nothing but misery.
Christopher and Jonathan Nolan actually leave clues from The Prestige‘s first scene to its last that imply how it’s going to end. However, as Angier says about his and Borden’s magic tricks during the ingenious reveal, the audience doesn’t really want to know the secret of a trick during its performance. We watch The Prestige for the wonder it provides, and the satisfaction its final revelation brings, as though the movie were itself a work of magic, which, in a sense, it is.
Despite Its Smaller Scale, The Prestige Is One Of Nolan’s Best Sci-Fi Movies
The Movie Has Been Wrongly Forgotten In His Canon Of Sci-Fi Greats
The Prestige was made on a budget of $40 million, which is around four times smaller than the amounts it took to make Inception and Interstellar, and five times less than the cost of Tenet. Still, regardless of its smaller scale, the movie is one of Christopher Nolan’s best works of science fiction, that uses its cloning machine to explore the nature of idenтιтy and consciousness.
Released between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and with more modest box office numbers than Inception and Interstellar, The Prestige may never have the same legacy as one of Christopher Nolan‘s larger-scale blockbusters, but it should nevertheless be viewed as one of his most unique and entertaining works of cinema.
