How box-in-the-head do you have to be? One would think you'd like the video of you actually liked it, not because the host told you to like the video 🤡
@@eliotmccambridge5722 Probably not, but a huge oversight and one of the best tit for tat moments in the movie that isn't even mentioned. Angier is so fucking bonkers he buried a man alive because of his obsession.
This film had a Batman, an alfred, a wolverine, a black widow, a Ulysses Klaue and another Alfred yet there was no blue beam of light into the sky that threatened the fate of the universe 2/10
The real magic in The Prestige was that Angier literally defied the laws of science in an attempt to recreate Borden's trick, and still wasn't able to complete it as elegantly as Borden was. That's the magic, that sometimes the simple, most obvious way of doing a trick well is the most effective. The Borden twins could switch on/off and take the applause, while Angier would never live past the grand reveal.
That's not at all the point of the movie, and I'd definitely argue that Angier's solution is FAR more elegant. The real point is that they both went to extremes to accomplish the same trick, and both ruined their lives over it. Angier pulled off ACTUAL magic to accomplish his trick, at the cost of literally killing himself over and over again. Borden went with the absolute simplest method of performing such a trick, but had to commit to it so hard that he ruined the lives of both himself and his double in the process. It's the same story of hubris for each.
@@amityislandchum I agree with everything other than your first statement. The idea that he went to such extremes to replicate the trick that was simply done with twins is definitely a statement the film makes. But yes, their hubris ruined both of them.
@@Pixelology they are false. Wax. Bodies don't stay that preserved in water. You can ask many questions as you want, this is isn't theory but facts. And it resolves all the plot holes the "working machine" creates.
The teleporting man twist is still a master stroke of writing. The theory that the replication machine is just a tale told by wolverine to batman to mess with his mind is also a great fan theory to have in mind.
I'm pretty sure thats the actual prestige of the movie. The whole film is setup like a magic trick and in the end you still think it was magic. All the scenes where the cloning happens is all told via wolverines journal and we already know not to trust them as we saw in Batman's journal he made shit up. The only scene where we could say the cloning is real is one of the final shots where the dead bodies are, however wolverine found a look alike before and it's more likely he could do that then have a real cloning machine. As Alfred says "you're not really looking, you don't want to know". Nolan is well known to go above and beyond what a film can be and has never answered whether or not this is the case
@@MELK0R87 I'm sorry, but there's a scene at the end where we see the machine working after the journal parts have ended, so no the machine definitely worked.
@@ollyhodges Nope, the scene is the final confrontation between the surviving Borden twin and Angier. It shows us the contrast between the two, one living half a life (Borden) and the other killing himself repeatedly (Angier) for their trick. There's no difference in the framing between the two, neither of them speak aloud what we are shown, it's just for us the audience as confirmation that finally here at the end they can be honest with each other. Furthermore, the body we see in the tank at the end (who the people believing the fan theory say is Gerald Root) isn't the tank Borden looks at. Again, it's a shot just for us the audience, Borden is looking at all the tanks. The unreliable narrator framing device starts at 7:38 and is dropped at the 1:31:40 (in my copy of the film) so unless you want to say everything we are shown before and after that is just a lie, in which case we might as well believe Angier died or that Borden's wife never hung herself or that Borden was never reunited with his daughter.
I love that after coming off five transformers movies week after week they have to cleanse their palate with Nolan films so they can find a passion in cinema again
"imagine..in this era being audience member so innocent ..you can applaud the reveal of a big machine" ....... *stares at apple events revealing the same products over and over but we still clap and get excited*
I think if you’re attend/invited to events like that, you’re expected to clap, whether out of politeness or whatever. Now I really wanna see an apple event where the product reveal is met with dead silence.
David Bowie brings his friends to the premier of The Illusionist, and is humiliated when none of his Tesla scenes are shown. "Those bastards cut my scenes!"
@@conorrace4214 I HATE when singers are cast in films, but Bowie was a great actor! I even say his portrayal of Nikola Tesla is my personal favorite of the famed scientist. RIP Starman
Doesn't he explicitly choose drowning because Michael Caine told him that drowning is like falling asleep to comfort him about his wife's drowning. Then the bit where michael tells him lied and Jackman realized that he's been torturing his clones/himself for all the shows. I think Jackman thought he was doing the clones a mercy.
@@raleighsmith5299 You're probably right, It's been a while since I saw the movie, it was just the general feeling I've had since seeing it last but I could be very wrong lol
I think by that stage he had already made the choice. He was the closest one to the gun, he wasn't "the man in the box" in his mind. But, lo and behold, indeed he was, a hundred times over he was.
@@RandomAssaultPodcast It could be a combination of both. That he was giving them the mercy and solace of death that he craved for himself out of the guilt that he felt. His obsession had consumed him so much that he wasn't even living anymore, and his clones got to embrace the sweet release of death that he couldn't achieve because that obsession wouldn't allow him to do so. He probably longed to die instead of living life without his wife that he felt guilty of not saving, but was too consumed to do so, and so gave that release to his clones
Always loved this one from Nolan & I think Tesla's appearance might be my favourite character introduction - just striding through the 'lightning' as cool as a Bowie shaped cucumber. This one is a miracle of editing also, as the boys pointed out. Bonus points for the Kingdom Hearts reference. Nice one, Ben.
I was a teenager hanging out at my friend's house one day when his mom randomly took us to the movies. Never happened before. Never happened again. The movie was The Prestige. I didn’t know anything about it. Never saw a single poster or trailer. Went in completely blind and was floored by this movie. Still probably the most memorable movie-going experience of my life.
I was working at a movie theatre when this came out and saw it on a whim after hours (I did the projection work), and it grabbed me the same way. It’s one of those movies I re watch every few years and never get tired of
I remember when we rented this movie to watch with my parents. My mom has an eagle eye for recognizing faces and was utterly confused why Christian Bale was running around in his full disguise, and ruined that twist for herself
@@blyzer7373 I would agree it's no doubt the most important "twist" to the entire narrative. But not as important as other movies that only rely on and just have that one BIG Twist. Still much more to this than knowing that one thing early on or going in.
I misunderstood the opening scene of the movie or a time jump or something and immediately concluded that there were two of each of them and it wasn't a secret or anything. Twist ruined because my broken clock just happened to be right.
It’s really good since if you don’t even get the subtleties, it still makes sense. I did some digging to learn all the details and the movie didn’t get more confusing. It’s like those “Quantum realm explanied at 5 different eductaion levels” :D You get it regardless of how much you know it.
1. Memento 2. Interstellar 3. The Prestige 4. Inception 5. The Dark Knight 6.Dunkirk 7. The Dark Knight Rises 8. Tenet 9. Batman Begins 10. Following 11. Insomnia
My interpretation of him drowning himself/the copy isn’t that he has to kill the other, it’s that he is planning on setting up Borden for his murder the whole time. He knows that eventually Borden will have to see the set up and is basically dying/killing himself to frame Borden. He does it every night in the hopes he will come beneath the stage. The reason he drowns in the tank he is knows that people will assume Borden decided to drown him due to their previous incident with the tank. It kind of sets up the whole ‘gotcha’ journal moment “sitting in your prison cell” etc because he know he’d be caught and arrested for his murder. Just the way I’ve always seen it. Great video as always guys
@@theianprender-cast3863 He also always killed his other self in the machine because he wanted the glory and applause of the public, thing that the one who stayed in the machine would be bitter about
@@theianprender-cast3863 I just pointed out another one of the reasons why he drowned himself. What he did was drown himself so theres only one of him, he wanted to frame Borden, die and suffer the same as his wife and also see the faces of the people when he revealed himself at the end, so in the mind of the one who recieved the applause it was worth trading his humanity in favor of experiencing the glory at the end of the prestige even when he himself was drowning behind the machine experiencing the complete opposite
The editing in this movie is amazing. And I love how Nolan incorporated the Edison vs Tesla conflict in the plot. But I just can't believe that they would find another Hugh Jackman in the same city in some bar.
The process of them finding a double for Angiers takes Cutter months. I think you could find a convincing double for someone in a city as big as London if that was your job, as it is Cutter's essentially.
10:55 "which ever one is the real Hugh Jackman" They're both the real Hugh Jackman, the cloning machine isn't creating a copy - its creating another original. Bowie explains this when he says "they're all your hat" after Hugh asks which hat is the original
Two points here. 1 - I did the math - if orig teleported, and clone stays on platform, then orig has been shot dead - if clone teleported, and orig stays on platform, then orig has drowned at least once - thus I conclude they are both identical sentient copies. 2 - this film deviates from Christopher Priest’s original book, where the machine creates a sort of pale weaker not-same-as-subject creature. Nolan’s change is better.
@@TheLegoJungle for some reason, reading your comment triggered me to realize that if hed just kept that first clone alive they couldve run the trick flawlessly themselves, switching off....but he never even considered it
@@Adamdidit But then would he be better than Borden? This was a contest of one-upping, and doing the trick like that would just be copying Borden. There's also the possibility that he was doing it on purpose because he knew Borden wouldn't be able to resist trying to find out his secret, and so used the drownings as a means to get Borden killed and adopt his daughter while Borden rots in a prison cell awaiting execution knowing he can do nothing about it. The ultimate revenge and conquering of his rival.
This is my favorite Nolan movie. I've watched it at least 50 times. Allow me to explain some things you missed: 1. Don't let Nolan's obsession with having his films feel realistic, make you believe he thinks they are realistic. He wants to tell stories that are supernatural, but just feel real. 2. Angier drowns his clones because he wants to feel what it's like to drown just like his wife. This is foreshadowed when Angier is submerging his face in the sink. 3. Angier and Borden are two versions of the same type of person. Borden's character represents a man wrestling with himself, but Angier represents a man who's already killed the self he wrestled with. And any time the other part of Angier comes up, he kills him again. 4. Borden's twin being hidden in plain sight is meant to be a figurative representation of how his ulterior self is always with him. 5. The ultimate moral of this story is that, Borden's and Angier's ambitious selves, recognized the emptiness of materialism and wanted to rise above it. Borden says this at the beginning of the film - after they saw the Chinese magicians show, "Sacrifice. That's what it takes to escape all this." Borden says as he makes a fist and taps the city building next to him. Then at the end of the film, Angier says to Borden's non-ambitious self, "You never understood why we did this, did you? The world is simple, miserable and solid all the way through." then says that, "... it was the look on peoples faces" as to why the two magicians were so obsessed. 6. Point #5 is why Angier never used the machine to duplicate material things.
Yeah, that whole exchange was legendary. Angier saying "it was the look on their faces" is what completed the movie and the character. Borden says before that "It takes nothing to steal another man's work" and Angier replies, "It takes everything". Angier would have done anything it if it meant he could be the best showman, even if that meant he had to kill a conscious, real clone of himself while not knowing if he would be the man that was going into the box, or the prestige. No matter what the cost was, he did it because he truly had a passion for fooling people and entertaining the masses. Amazing movie. I rewatch it every couple of months. For whatever reason that line that Borden says "Simple maybe, but not easy" has stuck with me.
Petition for a cinematic universe where in every movie Tesla shows up, invents an incredible world-changing machine, then dismisses it immediately and leaves.
What if Jackman went into the cloning machine and at the last moment a cat was sick in the cloning machine and made a half Jackman half cat sick being? It's okay guys, I I know the questions we want answered
it would make no difference... he gets cloned, and his clothes get cloned... yet he doesn't end up as a half human half cloth abomination. It's a cloning machine, not a molecular teleporter (the Fly)
This is one of my favorite movies of all time - me and two of my brothers decided to watch it randomly and by the end we were (literally) sitting on the edge of the couch. And that twin reveal? Yea didn't see it coming -- it seems so obvious afterwards, but you're so focused on the rivalry you just don't take it into account.
One interesting bit that I think some people miss: The recurring tricks with the birds give away how the The Transported Man is performed, and what it costs. The first bird trick we see, the magician that Borden is assisting, the man kills the bird by smashing it, and using a trap door, he sends the bird below the "stage" of the table, then a few seconds later, produces a second bird that he passes off as the first (a boy in the audience even cries, saying "but where's his brother?". This is resonant and significant, since he's saying it to Borden himself, who visibly winces -- Borden uses his own brother to perform the same trick, and knows that this bird's "brother" was murdered to make the trick happen. Then later on, Angier tries a new bird trick, with a collapsing bird cage, where the dove is transported instantly from the cage to behind his back. It appeals to him, because he thinks he "doesn't have to get his hands dirty" and kill doves. But when he attempts to perform it, the dove is indeed killed, and his hands are splattered in blood (and an audience member's hands are mangled). This again reflects Angier's Real Transported Man trick, a trick he didn't realize the consequences of until the first time he tested it. And finally, the words Cutter says at both the beginning and end of the film -- "it's not enough to make something disappear ... you have to bring it back." and we see scenes of him performing the disappearing bird trick for Borden's daughter, and then her being overjoyed when Cutter produces her supposedly executed father for her as well. Interestingly, I don't think we get to see Cutter's method for the version of the disappearing bird trick he performs for the daughter.
This is one of those movies that came out too early. If The Prestige comes out today after Nolan has established himself with the Dark Knight trilogy and his many great films afterwards, and THEN comes out with what I consider to be his best film… I think he wins best adapted screenplay, possibly best director, David Bowie and Michael Caine get nominated for supporting actor, Bale and Jackman get nominated for lead actor, etc… it’s a masterpiece.
Yeah Michael Andrews I’m gonna rewatch this because I basically HATE Nolan films. I’m super unpopular for that opinion. But this seems better and I think I liked it the first time.
My FAVORITE theory I've seen is that Tesla's assistant played by Andy Serkis was actually the REAL Tesla, and David Bowie's character was the true assistant or simply an actor hired to play the role. I can't remember the video but somebody made a pretty fantastic breakdown
Considering Jackman killed that many clones of himself, pretty sure you missed a trick here: "The Deadest Showman." A quick Google suggests I'm the first to actually use this about this movie, so I'm taking this W.
I didn't see it that way before. I always thought because it's the easiest way to kill the one that 'disappears'. Now that you mentioned it, yeah, maybe that's why he plans to do 100 shows.
I always wondered why Hugh Jackman's Character let Old Michael Caine's Character break the glass when he could have done it himself with much greater Strength!!!
I think it was because Michael Caine is the one ready to do it, that's his function and they can lose no time. But yeah, he could have taken the axe and maybe saved his wife. But didn't she drown to quickly? I really don't know how long it takes to drown, but I suppose she was trained for that.
@@ErickGarcia-qs2yh It seems kind of careless that if there's trouble with a water tank the only option is to crack it open with an axe. It seems to be a slow process that doesn't fit well with an emergency.
The book is a very different, yet equally riveting, experience. It has a more sinister feel, and the teleportation works differently, but is a great read. Just don't expect a novelisation of the film.
@GiRayne Yeah fair. I'm not sure if I'd call Nolan's work sexist, I think he's very focused on exploring masculinity and themes related to such, they feature deeply flawed men as the focus, even his Batman is far from being a role model. Despite having strong women, they are mostly just plot devices. I suppose it's all rather in the eye of the beholder, though I think he just has things to say about men and not women.
@GiRayne I think Ellen Page in Inception and Jessica Chastain in Interstellar had very important roles, though Ellen wasn't that deep, so wasn't Joseph Gordon Levit or Tom Hardy. I think most of his films had several characters who were only plot points, and some of them were women. But I think that the Scarlett Johansson character fell in love too easily for both magicians in The Prestige. And I just think he didn't have a female lead, cuz he is a man and uses his own perspective in his lead characters.
My partner pointed out that her only issue was how strange it is that Hugh Jackman ALSO has an identical twin, and wished theyd tweaked it just so Rook was an accidental clone when they first checked the machine and decided it didnt yet work. Also, when i rewatch it (often) i can track which brother is which because one brother is more aggressive and the other is often apologetic. Its actually quite consistent that they flip almost every scene so you can tell merely by assuming that each time that time passes they swap; you'll see that he flips from angry to calm every scene. Its almost never the same brother for two scenes in a row.
It is convenient that there was a working actor who was willing to be hired by him that also looked exactly like Angier. Even the best stunt doubles don't look exactly the same as the people they are doubling for. It's not impossible to find lookalikes of famous people, but it is hard to find one that could literally play you.
you're absolutely right that the two Bordens have distinct personalities. One is boorish and crass, argumentative, discontent. The other is wiser and more sincere and serene. He's the one that falls in love with Sarah and insists on marriage and children, while the angrier one is the one who rebels and insists on the affair, and is obsessed with Angier and revenge. He's the one who is buried and then acts like a prick when he's dug up. He's also the one that is hanged. So in the end, Borden's daughter does get a true happy ending in that it is her real father, the one who loved Sarah, who comes back.
I usually hate when TH-camrs ask me to like a video before it's even gotten started, but with you guys, I know I'm going to like or anyway, so James telling me to is actually super helpful
You guys missed an important point as to why H. Jackmans character couldn't live with a clone of himself and perform the trick the same body-double way he did it with his look-a-like (and how the Borden twins did it). Not only would he need to share the spotlight with the copy, but the biggest problem is he simply lacked all kinds of respect for the trick because he didn't believe it possible to perform the sacrifice needed to have it done. The t magic trick is so amazing that he refuses to believe that Borden does it by simply uses a double. He doesn't understand that that's the trick because he simply cannot fathom having to share an entire life with another person, on and off stage. So, one, he doesn't have respect for it because he thinks it's too simple, and two he cannot believe that anybody could perform it properly because of the sacrifice it requires off-stage. To the very end he refuses to believe that that's how Borden does it. So instead he clones and kills himself every night. It may be more painful and traumatic, but it's in his mind a more awesome trick and way "easier" to perform.
One thing is after you've panicked and killed the first any copy you make has the memory of you killing the first. That's probably a whole nother movie idea right there.
@@EtherDais I was listening to it on Spotify and it's just disappointing that people don't have the courtesy to put a time stamp in. Some people are doing other things when they listen to these and it would be nice for busy people who don't catch something to be able to go back and laugh at the funny parts they miss. I heard/caught it when I listened/watched (not signed in) but I put the effort in to put a time stamp in if I'm listening and signed into youtube. Does that make sense?
I'm REALLY enjoying these videos! I've watched a few here and there in the past but now I'm a regular subscriber. Your banter is on point and the editing is fantastic. Really great work. Thank you for doing these!
I thought Jackman's character explicitly said in the film that he never knew which one of him would stay put and which one would reappear, so we may not know where the original Jackman is.
I feel this is true about all Nolan... His obsession with realism is really limiting imagination for some of the films sometimes... Interstellar space stations look like earth... Inception dream is just warped building architecture...
I had a theory on the Hugh Jackman “sacrifice” line a while back. Bowie said the machine wasn’t working properly. And near the end of the film Jackman says “it took courage to go into the machine” and to not know if he was going in the water or in the prestige. I think the first time it happened the original Jackman was transported and a clone took his place. I think the problem with the machine was Tesla couldn’t figure out why it was doing it and not just cloning him elsewhere. When Jackman first clones himself the new Jackman (hehe) says “No don’t I’m...” and then gets shot. I think a clone took his place at the machine. When he’s looking at his hands, it’s like he just blacked out and woke up. If you think about a clone being brought to life, he’d have a gap between the last memory of throwing the switch and when he appears. So I think the original Jackman got transported and said no don’t I’m the original, or tried to, before the clone shot him. Why exactly is more of a mystery but possibly because Jackman thought he couldn’t trust what would happen if more than one of him were alive (the whole fight for control thing with his body double plays into this I guess). So I think that every time Jackman flipped the switch it was 50-50 whether he’d be moved or stay in the spot. If he was moved, the trapdoor opens quick enough that the clone can’t escape and if not, he knows drowning will be painless, because Michael Caine told him it was like going home. Only that ended up being a lie, and so Jackman ended up playing roulette with his life dozens and dozens of times and died an agonising death if it didn’t go right. But what’s more, the Jackman at the end says “never knowing if he would be the one etc” meaning that Jackman has possibly survived multiple attempts, or at least the very last one when the clone died. I think the point of the ending is actually that exact sentiment. It focuses on Jackmans lifeless corpse and we now know there are hundreds, who all died in agony. We spent the film figuring out Borden’s trick and through a perspective that he was the protagonist and the moral victory. When actually we weren’t looking for the secret plot that Jackman was the true magician in the end. We wanted to be fooled.
i LOVE the idea that Angier comes into possession of a device that can DUPLICATE ANYTHING, including human life -- an infinite money, infinite energy, infinite resource machine -- and he uses it to perform tacky magic tricks that he expects people to assume are fake. It's so bonkers in its lack of perspective. But that's how obsession works. It's a credit to the story, IMO, not a plot hole.
I remember in my High School Film Studies class, our teacher chose to screen The Illusionist when we all made it clear we preferred The Prestige. We nearly rioted, but then a curtain opened and a TV on a cart was revealed. We politely applauded.
You touched on the 'knot issue' I'd never thought about before, bravo. You didn't mention the wife's suicide because she (?) realized her husband were lowkey twins
I don't think she realized they were twins. If that was the case they could have worked that out. It seemed more that she finally realized that the reason he didn't mean it when he said he loved her was because he was "having an affair" with his assistant, and when she straight up asks him whether he loves her he tells her straight up he doesn't. Which, to her, was saying he cared more for some woman than the wife he married and the child they brought into the world. The conversation with the assistant after the wife's suicide has her say the wife wanted to talk to her but was too afraid. She asks him what she wanted to say, and the twin responds with his "part of me loved her, part of me loved you" bit, which suggests that's what she wanted to bring up, but that doesn't mean it's what the wife actually knew or suspected.
I love the story about Christopher Nolan saying I wouldn’t make this movie without David Bowie… as it’s a very brief cameo he wrote, it’s a huge flex and amounts to him saying “I really wanna meet David Bowie.”
The original jackman is always transported to somewhere else and the copy replaces him (it's a transporting machine that happens to also leave a copy). The evil copy knew that after he killed the original the first time. that's why he kept killing the one in the machine in his shows! he wanted the prestige. But at the end of the movie he says he didn't know which one he's going to be, so ... :D
We never really know what knot Christian Bale ties, it's never established what the knots look like or how they are tied, we are just given mentions of the names of two knots, one that is said to be safe and one that is considered risky. In the scene he starts to tie one, she gives him a look, and he re-ties it differently. We don't know if he started the good one and she was encouraging him to try the other, or if she was giving him a look to say "do it properly." The brilliance is that it plays to our prejudices, the movie, especially on the first viewing, sets us to suspect Christian Bale and sympathize with Hugh Jackman. We believe without clear evidence that Bale actively did the wrong thing. Whichever twin did tie the knot may in fact not remember which knot he completed as he did clearly START both, and the traumatic event would make his question every move he had made. We're led to see Jackman as a tragic good guy who loses his wife, and Bale as the villain who seems like a crazy person with a manic personality. By the end we learn that Bale is actually two people with different personalities, and Jackman has gone mad, becoming so obsessed with their magic rivalry that it isn't about his wife anymore, and even Michael Caine's character, who blamed Christian Bale for the wife's death, thinks Jack man has gone too far by the end.
Heard a theory about this movie recently that blew my mind, and it makes so much sense, and if it's what the Nolans actually intended, then this movie is just a masterpiece of storytelling sleight of hand and is low-key Nolan's best movie. And I'm a HUGE fan of The Dark Knight, so that's big coming from me. The teleportation machine didn't actually work. Think about it... everything else about this story is totally realistic. It's not a science fiction movie. The teleportation/cloning stuff being real is a pretty big leap for the story to take, when the movie is otherwise totally about... magic tricks! ... aka, deception. Convincing people that something extraordinary is possible, when it's really just an illusion. The first thing to realize is that Angier's diary that Borden is reading? Almost everything in it is bullshit that Angier made up to trick Borden. Angier's a MAJORLY unreliable narrator in this movie. Tesla did actually work on a teleportation machine... but he abandoned it. Not because it was too dangerous, as Angier claims... but because it didn't work. The real part of the conversation that we do see between Angier and Tesla, Tesla essentially tells him that he's just obsessed. But through Angier's unreliable narration, we're convinced this scene is Tesla just giving a fair warning before proceeding... but the reality was most likely that Tesla told him he's crazy and this isn't going to work. And Tesla was right. As usual. The ACTUAL way Angier did the trick? The same way he did it the first time. He used the actor double they found. We're left to assume that he left or they let him go because he was difficult and whatnot, and Angier wasn't happy with doing the trick that way... but no. Angier kept using him, he just started doing a better job of keeping him hidden... even from us. THAT'S who dies in the tank that Borden is framed for. The drowning only actually happened once. For every other performance, the actor probably just fell into a crash mat like we saw in the earlier version of the trick. That's why he's freaking out as he drowns... it's not an Angier clone pretending for Borden's benefit. It's the actor freaking out about drowning in a tank he didn't expect to be there this time, because he was expecting a crash mat again. The times we see the drowning happening during Angier's explanation/confession montage? All just imagined images to convince us that Angier's claims were real. Those scenes we see in flashback of Angier using the machine the first time, shooting the duplicate, then "going into the machine every night, not knowing if I'd be dead or be the prestige..." ALL of that is bullshit that Angier is feeding Borden to keep him believing that he actually achieved something, other than framing Borden's twin. He needs him to believe the teleportation machine actually worked. He convinces Cutter of this too, because he doesn't want Cutter knowing that he murdered a real man, the actor that Cutter himself found and brought to Angier. Telling him that he just killed a clone of himself makes it seem less horrible. He doesn't want anybody knowing how the trick was REALLY done. All the tanks we see at the end? They're all empty, if you look closely. The only one with an "Angier" in it is the one with the dead actor still in it, which is the only one Nolan focuses clearly on to give us some misdirection into thinking all the other tanks have the same. They don't. That's what Borden is realizing at the end. He turns around and looks closely at the rest of the tanks for the first time, realizing they're empty. Angier didn't have a real teleportation machine... but he DID succeed in pulling off the greatest magic trick. Convincing everybody, even us the audience... that the teleportation machine was real. If this is the Nolans' actual intent (or Christopher Priest's, though I'm pretty sure the book is pretty different, and honestly this feels totally like Johnathan Nolan's type of storytelling, based on season 1 of Westworld and its endless twists and deeper levels to things)... then wow. Just wow. Amazingly well done, because yeah... everybody seems to come away from this movie thinking the teleportation machine was real, and that the brilliant reveal is all about how the great length Angier went to was killing himself every night. But the actual reveal is that the great length he went to was murdering an innocent man and lying to everybody, including Cutter. When Cutter tells him that drowning is agony, we're left to assume that Angier's look of guilt is him realizing what he was subjecting the different versions of himself to every night... but it's actually his guilt about what he did to the actor. "It takes everything." is referring to his morality about being a murderer just frame Borden and steal his trick while lying to everybody just to keep the secret... not to killing himself. This is why Cutter's narration tells us "You won't find (the real answer). You're not really looking. You want to be fooled." This narration comes as the hats are shown, then over the final images of the tanks. We won't realize the tanks are empty, because we're not really looking at them. We won't realize the hats weren't really cloned, because we're not really looking at reality when we see them. That's another figment of Angier's imagination in the diary. We want to believe the teleportation machine was real, because it's fun to believe in outlandish things like that. We want magic to be real. We don't want to realize the real horror and relatively mundane explanation for what happened... We want the movie to fool us. And it did. But the REALLY brilliant thing about it is that it works either way. The movie is great and works whether you believe the teleportation was real or not. You can fall for the fake twist and unreliable narration, and still enjoy the movie and feel like you got the reveal and everything. Then years later, someone on Quora asks "What's the most misunderstood plot device in a movie?" and someone responds with a brilliant breakdown of this theory about the teleportation machine, and my mind is blown so much I have to spread it to others to help appreciate this movie even more. Amazing.
Just rewatch the last scene again. While we dont get a close look at the background tanks there seems to be almost human looking shadows in them. Could they be dummy's? Who knows.
@@HealthySkepticism777 he doesn't do anymore shows after the framing as he is "dead" this theory is saying that every other show would have used a crashmat not a tank
James is going to get so much shit from people not knowing Caravan of Garbage is just the series name and they revisit good movies too
Oh good because I was ready to throw hands!
He always does. In the previous months they have put a disclaimer at the end of beginning of the video stating what CoG means. Lol
I only saw like 3 caravan of garbage where he reviews bad movies so yes I was triggered 😂
everybody please understand this before writing your comment
@@mitchellpearce3979 well we did
I almost forgot to thumbs up because James didn't verbally accost me to do so, but I verbally accosted myself and got that click in.
Thanks for verbally accosting me
Yeah thanks! Almost forgot..
Thanks for the reminder
Thank you kindly for doing James’ job.
How box-in-the-head do you have to be? One would think you'd like the video of you actually liked it, not because the host told you to like the video 🤡
The Angier vs Borden points bit may have been the best thing I've ever seen in Caravan of Garbage. Well done.
😂👌
It was way too good
They forgot about Angier burying one of the Borden's alive though.
@@thisisnotme33 I'll be honest I don't think it'll settle the points difference
@@eliotmccambridge5722 Probably not, but a huge oversight and one of the best tit for tat moments in the movie that isn't even mentioned. Angier is so fucking bonkers he buried a man alive because of his obsession.
This film had a Batman, an alfred, a wolverine, a black widow, a Ulysses Klaue and another Alfred yet there was no blue beam of light into the sky that threatened the fate of the universe 2/10
2 Alfreds?
You missed the most important part of all: NO WOLVERINE SINGING
You must have just went off the title
Not even a big grey cgi villain.
And a Jareth the Goblin King
The real magic in The Prestige was that Angier literally defied the laws of science in an attempt to recreate Borden's trick, and still wasn't able to complete it as elegantly as Borden was. That's the magic, that sometimes the simple, most obvious way of doing a trick well is the most effective.
The Borden twins could switch on/off and take the applause, while Angier would never live past the grand reveal.
That's not at all the point of the movie, and I'd definitely argue that Angier's solution is FAR more elegant. The real point is that they both went to extremes to accomplish the same trick, and both ruined their lives over it. Angier pulled off ACTUAL magic to accomplish his trick, at the cost of literally killing himself over and over again. Borden went with the absolute simplest method of performing such a trick, but had to commit to it so hard that he ruined the lives of both himself and his double in the process. It's the same story of hubris for each.
@@amityislandchum I agree with everything other than your first statement. The idea that he went to such extremes to replicate the trick that was simply done with twins is definitely a statement the film makes. But yes, their hubris ruined both of them.
You didn't get it. THE MACHINE DOESN'T WORK. You want to be fooled.
@@decaftundrahaha, what? Did you even watch the movie? The bodies, THE BODIES.
@@Pixelology they are false. Wax. Bodies don't stay that preserved in water. You can ask many questions as you want, this is isn't theory but facts. And it resolves all the plot holes the "working machine" creates.
The teleporting man twist is still a master stroke of writing. The theory that the replication machine is just a tale told by wolverine to batman to mess with his mind is also a great fan theory to have in mind.
I'm pretty sure thats the actual prestige of the movie. The whole film is setup like a magic trick and in the end you still think it was magic. All the scenes where the cloning happens is all told via wolverines journal and we already know not to trust them as we saw in Batman's journal he made shit up. The only scene where we could say the cloning is real is one of the final shots where the dead bodies are, however wolverine found a look alike before and it's more likely he could do that then have a real cloning machine.
As Alfred says "you're not really looking, you don't want to know". Nolan is well known to go above and beyond what a film can be and has never answered whether or not this is the case
@@MELK0R87 I'm sorry, but there's a scene at the end where we see the machine working after the journal parts have ended, so no the machine definitely worked.
@@RandomCarrot2806 That's true
@@RandomCarrot2806 Isn't that still told from Wolverine's perspective tho. He's telling Batman this. Still unreliable
@@ollyhodges Nope, the scene is the final confrontation between the surviving Borden twin and Angier. It shows us the contrast between the two, one living half a life (Borden) and the other killing himself repeatedly (Angier) for their trick. There's no difference in the framing between the two, neither of them speak aloud what we are shown, it's just for us the audience as confirmation that finally here at the end they can be honest with each other.
Furthermore, the body we see in the tank at the end (who the people believing the fan theory say is Gerald Root) isn't the tank Borden looks at. Again, it's a shot just for us the audience, Borden is looking at all the tanks. The unreliable narrator framing device starts at 7:38 and is dropped at the 1:31:40 (in my copy of the film) so unless you want to say everything we are shown before and after that is just a lie, in which case we might as well believe Angier died or that Borden's wife never hung herself or that Borden was never reunited with his daughter.
The first and last word the English Chinese Magician said was "Maclunkey"
Hahahahaha. Well that made me laugh!
NoooOOOooooOoooOoo
Little known fact that magician actually shot at his shooter at exactly the same time
Damn that’s good. Missed opportunity.
Maclunkey Culkin
I love that after coming off five transformers movies week after week they have to cleanse their palate with Nolan films so they can find a passion in cinema again
Well they are going to subject themselves to that Inception film . Never have I seen a film that was so up its own ass as that one .
Would rather have transformers though
mburu morris
Inception’s not bad. Not the best, but it’s not horrible.
@SwenglishGamer What do you mean everyone?
@SwenglishGamer Those loud foghorns by Hans Zimmer couldn't prevent anyone from having a nice nap at the cinema whilst watching this film .
"imagine..in this era being audience member so innocent ..you can applaud the reveal of a big machine" ....... *stares at apple events revealing the same products over and over but we still clap and get excited*
Shit, who is we. But point made. Lol
I mean, I suppose you might xD
I think if you’re attend/invited to events like that, you’re expected to clap, whether out of politeness or whatever.
Now I really wanna see an apple event where the product reveal is met with dead silence.
@@misatai5457 Blizzard's "Do you guys not have phones?" moment, but for Apple.
Thank you
David Bowie brings his friends to the premier of The Illusionist, and is humiliated when none of his Tesla scenes are shown.
"Those bastards cut my scenes!"
That was the day he wrote "rebel, rebel"
All jokes aside, he was fucking brilliant in the prestige
@@conorrace4214 I HATE when singers are cast in films, but Bowie was a great actor! I even say his portrayal of Nikola Tesla is my personal favorite of the famed scientist. RIP Starman
My interpretation for Hugh Jackman drowning himself over and over was him punishing himself because he blamed himself for his wife's death
🤔
Makes sense
Doesn't he explicitly choose drowning because Michael Caine told him that drowning is like falling asleep to comfort him about his wife's drowning. Then the bit where michael tells him lied and Jackman realized that he's been torturing his clones/himself for all the shows. I think Jackman thought he was doing the clones a mercy.
@@raleighsmith5299 You're probably right, It's been a while since I saw the movie, it was just the general feeling I've had since seeing it last but I could be very wrong lol
I think by that stage he had already made the choice. He was the closest one to the gun, he wasn't "the man in the box" in his mind. But, lo and behold, indeed he was, a hundred times over he was.
@@RandomAssaultPodcast It could be a combination of both. That he was giving them the mercy and solace of death that he craved for himself out of the guilt that he felt. His obsession had consumed him so much that he wasn't even living anymore, and his clones got to embrace the sweet release of death that he couldn't achieve because that obsession wouldn't allow him to do so. He probably longed to die instead of living life without his wife that he felt guilty of not saving, but was too consumed to do so, and so gave that release to his clones
The best part of this movie is accurately showing how obsessive and petty magician grudges are.
Source: Professional magician for 14 years.
Always loved this one from Nolan & I think Tesla's appearance might be my favourite character introduction - just striding through the 'lightning' as cool as a Bowie shaped cucumber. This one is a miracle of editing also, as the boys pointed out.
Bonus points for the Kingdom Hearts reference. Nice one, Ben.
"As cool as a Bowie shaped cucumber." 🤘🤣
It was David bowie being David bowie
I was a teenager hanging out at my friend's house one day when his mom randomly took us to the movies. Never happened before. Never happened again. The movie was The Prestige. I didn’t know anything about it. Never saw a single poster or trailer. Went in completely blind and was floored by this movie. Still probably the most memorable movie-going experience of my life.
That's a helluva way to experience this film!
Seeing The Dark Knight was the best time I had at the movies.
I was working at a movie theatre when this came out and saw it on a whim after hours (I did the projection work), and it grabbed me the same way. It’s one of those movies I re watch every few years and never get tired of
Before there was BvS, before there was Civil War, there was Batman vs Wolverine: Battle of Magic.
Batman vs Wolverine (and also Black Widow and 2 versions of Alfred and also Klaue) : Battle of Magic
*Batman vs Wolverine: Moustache Madness
Arguably this is Nolan's best film. Wonderful take on obsession, magic, and trickery.
It’s his worst, actually.
@@justincoleman3805 stfu
It's certainly my favourite of his
@@justincoleman3805idiotic take
And twins and replicant machines. Whatever.
I remember when we rented this movie to watch with my parents. My mom has an eagle eye for recognizing faces and was utterly confused why Christian Bale was running around in his full disguise, and ruined that twist for herself
Luckily that's not the only twist.
@@DarrellLeeB Yeah but that's kinda THE twist of the movie...
@@blyzer7373 I would agree it's no doubt the most important "twist" to the entire narrative. But not as important as other movies that only rely on and just have that one BIG Twist. Still much more to this than knowing that one thing early on or going in.
I misunderstood the opening scene of the movie or a time jump or something and immediately concluded that there were two of each of them and it wasn't a secret or anything. Twist ruined because my broken clock just happened to be right.
@@benroberts2222 I accidentally watched the Illusionist first and was really confused.
Hugh Jackman looks like he's have so much fun playing the drunk lookalike.
This is one of the best written films I’ve ever seen. Easily his best imo
It’s really good since if you don’t even get the subtleties, it still makes sense. I did some digging to learn all the details and the movie didn’t get more confusing. It’s like those “Quantum realm explanied at 5 different eductaion levels” :D You get it regardless of how much you know it.
1. Memento
2. Interstellar
3. The Prestige
4. Inception
5. The Dark Knight
6.Dunkirk
7. The Dark Knight Rises
8. Tenet
9. Batman Begins
10. Following
11. Insomnia
@@joshtoomes870 seeing insomnia down there hurts my soul
YES
My interpretation of him drowning himself/the copy isn’t that he has to kill the other, it’s that he is planning on setting up Borden for his murder the whole time. He knows that eventually Borden will have to see the set up and is basically dying/killing himself to frame Borden. He does it every night in the hopes he will come beneath the stage.
The reason he drowns in the tank he is knows that people will assume Borden decided to drown him due to their previous incident with the tank.
It kind of sets up the whole ‘gotcha’ journal moment “sitting in your prison cell” etc because he know he’d be caught and arrested for his murder.
Just the way I’ve always seen it.
Great video as always guys
@@theianprender-cast3863 He also always killed his other self in the machine because he wanted the glory and applause of the public, thing that the one who stayed in the machine would be bitter about
@@theianprender-cast3863 I just pointed out another one of the reasons why he drowned himself.
What he did was drown himself so theres only one of him, he wanted to frame Borden, die and suffer the same as his wife and also see the faces of the people when he revealed himself at the end, so in the mind of the one who recieved the applause it was worth trading his humanity in favor of experiencing the glory at the end of the prestige even when he himself was drowning behind the machine experiencing the complete opposite
Also he says he never knows which Angier is the real one so its kinda like the coin flip problem from Soma.
The bit where you guys scored the characters against each other had me rolling god I love this series
bowie’s role as tesla is so iconic and he can’t help but steal every scene he is in. the introduction itself is so badass.
The editing in this movie is amazing. And I love how Nolan incorporated the Edison vs Tesla conflict in the plot. But I just can't believe that they would find another Hugh Jackman in the same city in some bar.
Don't you know? Anytime you want to find a double of yourself, you go to the first bar and find a down-on-his-luck actor.
@@davidjames579 Oh seriously? Then I gonna find my double right now. Thanks for the tip man.
@@ErickGarcia-qs2yh Remember not to ask the bar person for a double though.
The process of them finding a double for Angiers takes Cutter months. I think you could find a convincing double for someone in a city as big as London if that was your job, as it is Cutter's essentially.
10:55 "which ever one is the real Hugh Jackman"
They're both the real Hugh Jackman, the cloning machine isn't creating a copy - its creating another original. Bowie explains this when he says "they're all your hat" after Hugh asks which hat is the original
Yeah that's true. That's also why the clone comes with the "original" memories.
Oh so that’s why the first Two Jackman says “No wait I’m the-“ before getting shot. Despite finding himself outside the machine, he knows he is legit.
Two points here.
1 - I did the math - if orig teleported, and clone stays on platform, then orig has been shot dead - if clone teleported, and orig stays on platform, then orig has drowned at least once - thus I conclude they are both identical sentient copies.
2 - this film deviates from Christopher Priest’s original book, where the machine creates a sort of pale weaker not-same-as-subject creature. Nolan’s change is better.
@@TheLegoJungle for some reason, reading your comment triggered me to realize that if hed just kept that first clone alive they couldve run the trick flawlessly themselves, switching off....but he never even considered it
@@Adamdidit But then would he be better than Borden? This was a contest of one-upping, and doing the trick like that would just be copying Borden.
There's also the possibility that he was doing it on purpose because he knew Borden wouldn't be able to resist trying to find out his secret, and so used the drownings as a means to get Borden killed and adopt his daughter while Borden rots in a prison cell awaiting execution knowing he can do nothing about it. The ultimate revenge and conquering of his rival.
This is my favorite Nolan movie. I've watched it at least 50 times. Allow me to explain some things you missed:
1. Don't let Nolan's obsession with having his films feel realistic, make you believe he thinks they are realistic. He wants to tell stories that are supernatural, but just feel real.
2. Angier drowns his clones because he wants to feel what it's like to drown just like his wife. This is foreshadowed when Angier is submerging his face in the sink.
3. Angier and Borden are two versions of the same type of person. Borden's character represents a man wrestling with himself, but Angier represents a man who's already killed the self he wrestled with. And any time the other part of Angier comes up, he kills him again.
4. Borden's twin being hidden in plain sight is meant to be a figurative representation of how his ulterior self is always with him.
5. The ultimate moral of this story is that, Borden's and Angier's ambitious selves, recognized the emptiness of materialism and wanted to rise above it. Borden says this at the beginning of the film - after they saw the Chinese magicians show, "Sacrifice. That's what it takes to escape all this." Borden says as he makes a fist and taps the city building next to him. Then at the end of the film, Angier says to Borden's non-ambitious self, "You never understood why we did this, did you? The world is simple, miserable and solid all the way through." then says that, "... it was the look on peoples faces" as to why the two magicians were so obsessed.
6. Point #5 is why Angier never used the machine to duplicate material things.
Yeah, that whole exchange was legendary. Angier saying "it was the look on their faces" is what completed the movie and the character. Borden says before that "It takes nothing to steal another man's work" and Angier replies, "It takes everything". Angier would have done anything it if it meant he could be the best showman, even if that meant he had to kill a conscious, real clone of himself while not knowing if he would be the man that was going into the box, or the prestige. No matter what the cost was, he did it because he truly had a passion for fooling people and entertaining the masses.
Amazing movie. I rewatch it every couple of months. For whatever reason that line that Borden says "Simple maybe, but not easy" has stuck with me.
This is my favourite movie of all time and I don't care what anyone says.
same
It’s a masterpiece. It really is.
My favorite Nolan movie alongside memento.
7:05 The Incredible Hulk is my favourite Scarlett Johansson movie
Deep Throat is my favorite yo mama movie.
@@justincoleman3805 got 'im.
Petition for a cinematic universe where in every movie Tesla shows up, invents an incredible world-changing machine, then dismisses it immediately and leaves.
What if Jackman went into the cloning machine and at the last moment a cat was sick in the cloning machine and made a half Jackman half cat sick being?
It's okay guys, I I know the questions we want answered
Or what about a fly?
Or The Fly 2?
Comment is underrated
it would make no difference... he gets cloned, and his clothes get cloned... yet he doesn't end up as a half human half cloth abomination. It's a cloning machine, not a molecular teleporter (the Fly)
Nononono, that's the Wolverine lore, don't go mixing up your Jackmans.
What if we went in with a Rubberband in his pocket? Would we finally have Rubberbandman?
I honestly Googled "The Title Christopher Nolan"
Well he did name his protagonist The Protagonist
This is one of my favorite movies of all time - me and two of my brothers decided to watch it randomly and by the end we were (literally) sitting on the edge of the couch. And that twin reveal? Yea didn't see it coming -- it seems so obvious afterwards, but you're so focused on the rivalry you just don't take it into account.
I completely forgot that Niles from the Nanny was in this movie.
MR SHEFFIELD!!
You should be ashamed for ever watching The Nanny.
@@justincoleman3805 huh?
Huh?
So only on Sundays?
wow that summed up the movie; "Two men in different beards"
One interesting bit that I think some people miss: The recurring tricks with the birds give away how the The Transported Man is performed, and what it costs. The first bird trick we see, the magician that Borden is assisting, the man kills the bird by smashing it, and using a trap door, he sends the bird below the "stage" of the table, then a few seconds later, produces a second bird that he passes off as the first (a boy in the audience even cries, saying "but where's his brother?". This is resonant and significant, since he's saying it to Borden himself, who visibly winces -- Borden uses his own brother to perform the same trick, and knows that this bird's "brother" was murdered to make the trick happen.
Then later on, Angier tries a new bird trick, with a collapsing bird cage, where the dove is transported instantly from the cage to behind his back. It appeals to him, because he thinks he "doesn't have to get his hands dirty" and kill doves. But when he attempts to perform it, the dove is indeed killed, and his hands are splattered in blood (and an audience member's hands are mangled). This again reflects Angier's Real Transported Man trick, a trick he didn't realize the consequences of until the first time he tested it.
And finally, the words Cutter says at both the beginning and end of the film -- "it's not enough to make something disappear ... you have to bring it back." and we see scenes of him performing the disappearing bird trick for Borden's daughter, and then her being overjoyed when Cutter produces her supposedly executed father for her as well. Interestingly, I don't think we get to see Cutter's method for the version of the disappearing bird trick he performs for the daughter.
This is one of those movies that came out too early. If The Prestige comes out today after Nolan has established himself with the Dark Knight trilogy and his many great films afterwards, and THEN comes out with what I consider to be his best film… I think he wins best adapted screenplay, possibly best director, David Bowie and Michael Caine get nominated for supporting actor, Bale and Jackman get nominated for lead actor, etc… it’s a masterpiece.
My favourite bois talking bout one of my favourite films.
*perfection*
I could listen to these guys reading their grocery list
It’d just be big sandwiches and big sandwich supplies, but I’m with you, I’d listen
David Bowie walking through the electricity is so bloody iconic.
Ah The Prestige.
The best Nolan movie.
( *Shields myself beforehand Fanboys attack* )
But you're right!
Yeah Michael Andrews I’m gonna rewatch this because I basically HATE Nolan films. I’m super unpopular for that opinion. But this seems better and I think I liked it the first time.
My FAVORITE theory I've seen is that Tesla's assistant played by Andy Serkis was actually the REAL Tesla, and David Bowie's character was the true assistant or simply an actor hired to play the role. I can't remember the video but somebody made a pretty fantastic breakdown
As hilarious as always - bloody love this film, clone machine doesn’t bother me because by that point I’M ALL IN BABY!
The Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy theme was a nice touch, Ben!
Now I want Maso to pitch every character against one another for every movie they watch.
“Two” Jackman. Priceless.
Considering Jackman killed that many clones of himself, pretty sure you missed a trick here: "The Deadest Showman." A quick Google suggests I'm the first to actually use this about this movie, so I'm taking this W.
didnt he keep drowning them so that one day when borden went down he would get done for murder?
I didn't see it that way before. I always thought because it's the easiest way to kill the one that 'disappears'. Now that you mentioned it, yeah, maybe that's why he plans to do 100 shows.
He wasn't drowning "them", he was drowning himself. He was basically commiting suicide on every show.
No because in the act where borden was framed, he never reappeared in the act and faked his death
I always wondered why Hugh Jackman's Character let Old Michael Caine's Character break the glass when he could have done it himself with much greater Strength!!!
I think it was because Michael Caine is the one ready to do it, that's his function and they can lose no time. But yeah, he could have taken the axe and maybe saved his wife. But didn't she drown to quickly? I really don't know how long it takes to drown, but I suppose she was trained for that.
@@ErickGarcia-qs2yh It seems kind of careless that if there's trouble with a water tank the only option is to crack it open with an axe. It seems to be a slow process that doesn't fit well with an emergency.
Me: The illusionist is a real movie?
Christopher Nolan: Yes it is and it's AMAZING!!!
Subterfuge?
You don't talk to Christopher Nolan.
16:20 "...that's worth a million points"
*THPS SPECIAL SOUND EFFECT*
Worth the like right there.
The book is a very different, yet equally riveting, experience. It has a more sinister feel, and the teleportation works differently, but is a great read. Just don't expect a novelisation of the film.
The 'boom' sound of inception is not made by Hans Zimmer but by Zack Hemsey.
The cloning and the magic are really just devices to portray the difference between obsession and dedication.
Top 3 Nolan film for me. One of my favorites. The first time I saw this I was shook. Highly recommend. One of the best twist endings ever.
I loved the Illusionist. I have never seen the prestige, so thank you for the rundown. :D
+1 for Captain Disillusionment cameo!
Also good on you for dropping Corridor Crew into a couple of these (I probably +1'ed them too, who knows?)
Batman with enough prep defeats Wolverine and Black Widow is a double agent as always
Such an underrated movie. Glad it's getting some love here.
"A sea of mustaches and fake teeth" - James, 2020
Quote of the year
Time stamp, you son of a gun.
One of my favorite channels discussing one of my favorite movies and I've got a cup of coffee. A perfect morning.
I like to call Hugh Jackman, Huge Ackman. No one has noticed
Huge frikkin' Ackman
I'm gonna start doing that now.
Old Hiko Mori do it to everyone that’s famous. They’ve had it easy for too long. Also Crisp Rat is a good one.
@@googaboogaloo lol, that's pretty good.
Huge Jackedman
This is probably my favorite Nolan movie. I loved listening to you guys talk about it.
I love this movie, it's not Nolan's masterpiece but it's just so watchable and fun, and what a sexy cast!
It's definitely Nolan's masterpiece. I love his movies but this is the best one.
@GiRayne Yeah fair. I'm not sure if I'd call Nolan's work sexist, I think he's very focused on exploring masculinity and themes related to such, they feature deeply flawed men as the focus, even his Batman is far from being a role model. Despite having strong women, they are mostly just plot devices. I suppose it's all rather in the eye of the beholder, though I think he just has things to say about men and not women.
@GiRayne I think Ellen Page in Inception and Jessica Chastain in Interstellar had very important roles, though Ellen wasn't that deep, so wasn't Joseph Gordon Levit or Tom Hardy. I think most of his films had several characters who were only plot points, and some of them were women. But I think that the Scarlett Johansson character fell in love too easily for both magicians in The Prestige. And I just think he didn't have a female lead, cuz he is a man and uses his own perspective in his lead characters.
Absolutely amazing use of Kingdom Hearts, Ben.
Thank you.
My partner pointed out that her only issue was how strange it is that Hugh Jackman ALSO has an identical twin, and wished theyd tweaked it just so Rook was an accidental clone when they first checked the machine and decided it didnt yet work.
Also, when i rewatch it (often) i can track which brother is which because one brother is more aggressive and the other is often apologetic. Its actually quite consistent that they flip almost every scene so you can tell merely by assuming that each time that time passes they swap; you'll see that he flips from angry to calm every scene. Its almost never the same brother for two scenes in a row.
It is convenient that there was a working actor who was willing to be hired by him that also looked exactly like Angier. Even the best stunt doubles don't look exactly the same as the people they are doubling for. It's not impossible to find lookalikes of famous people, but it is hard to find one that could literally play you.
So which one gets killed? Angry or apologetic one?
@@blyzer7373 Angry one died.
@@blyzer7373 the angry cuz he said "I should have listened to you, I'm sorry".
you're absolutely right that the two Bordens have distinct personalities. One is boorish and crass, argumentative, discontent. The other is wiser and more sincere and serene. He's the one that falls in love with Sarah and insists on marriage and children, while the angrier one is the one who rebels and insists on the affair, and is obsessed with Angier and revenge. He's the one who is buried and then acts like a prick when he's dug up. He's also the one that is hanged. So in the end, Borden's daughter does get a true happy ending in that it is her real father, the one who loved Sarah, who comes back.
I usually hate when TH-camrs ask me to like a video before it's even gotten started, but with you guys, I know I'm going to like or anyway, so James telling me to is actually super helpful
Most underrated movie ever
bigevilworldwide1 ah so i see youre one of those guys who hates good movies to act smarter than everyone else
I like how they create actual magic and the first thing they do with it is try to make people think it's a fake trick
You guys missed an important point as to why H. Jackmans character couldn't live with a clone of himself and perform the trick the same body-double way he did it with his look-a-like (and how the Borden twins did it). Not only would he need to share the spotlight with the copy, but the biggest problem is he simply lacked all kinds of respect for the trick because he didn't believe it possible to perform the sacrifice needed to have it done.
The t magic trick is so amazing that he refuses to believe that Borden does it by simply uses a double. He doesn't understand that that's the trick because he simply cannot fathom having to share an entire life with another person, on and off stage.
So, one, he doesn't have respect for it because he thinks it's too simple, and two he cannot believe that anybody could perform it properly because of the sacrifice it requires off-stage. To the very end he refuses to believe that that's how Borden does it.
So instead he clones and kills himself every night. It may be more painful and traumatic, but it's in his mind a more awesome trick and way "easier" to perform.
8:16 I don't know why but this is one of the least channels I would have expected a Kingdom Hearts reference. Well done, XIII/10
This is my favorite movie. It blew my mind the first time I saw it. I catch something different every time I watch it.
One thing is after you've panicked and killed the first any copy you make has the memory of you killing the first. That's probably a whole nother movie idea right there.
"The blending of science, and magic, and the mystic arts-"
"And racism!"
"Yes, and casual racism!"
Lack of time stamps in this comment section is disheartening.
@@youtubedj9298 I guess you'll have to watch again and pay attention
@@EtherDais I was listening to it on Spotify and it's just disappointing that people don't have the courtesy to put a time stamp in.
Some people are doing other things when they listen to these and it would be nice for busy people who don't catch something to be able to go back and laugh at the funny parts they miss.
I heard/caught it when I listened/watched (not signed in) but I put the effort in to put a time stamp in if I'm listening and signed into youtube.
Does that make sense?
2:56.
@@Isaackariuki775 thanks bro.
"Timestampers" are the MVPs of the comment section.
I'm REALLY enjoying these videos! I've watched a few here and there in the past but now I'm a regular subscriber. Your banter is on point and the editing is fantastic. Really great work. Thank you for doing these!
9:40 Hugh Jackman‘s cameo as Nigel Thornberry,
No one:
Ben's edit at 16:32 🤣
He could have just grabbed a clip of Bale from Ford V Ferrari, but he went the extra mile.
"No one:"
Well except all the people who do it, including Ben?
Who laughed in the background when Maso said, "he's the greatest showman" 😂
Me! I thought he would push the point but Naso just stayed cool as a cucumber, knowing that someone would appreciate it
0:21 Love the poster for Nolan's "The Title" on the right haha
I thought Jackman's character explicitly said in the film that he never knew which one of him would stay put and which one would reappear, so we may not know where the original Jackman is.
Oh, he means like, he isn't sure if the person who stays put or the person who gets teleported is the clone.
I feel this is true about all Nolan...
His obsession with realism is really limiting imagination for some of the films sometimes... Interstellar space stations look like earth... Inception dream is just warped building architecture...
Batman v Wolverine: Dawn of Magic
Bless you for using a clip of the Heartless and Nobody from Kingdom Hearts 2
I had a theory on the Hugh Jackman “sacrifice” line a while back. Bowie said the machine wasn’t working properly. And near the end of the film Jackman says “it took courage to go into the machine” and to not know if he was going in the water or in the prestige. I think the first time it happened the original Jackman was transported and a clone took his place. I think the problem with the machine was Tesla couldn’t figure out why it was doing it and not just cloning him elsewhere.
When Jackman first clones himself the new Jackman (hehe) says “No don’t I’m...” and then gets shot. I think a clone took his place at the machine. When he’s looking at his hands, it’s like he just blacked out and woke up. If you think about a clone being brought to life, he’d have a gap between the last memory of throwing the switch and when he appears. So I think the original Jackman got transported and said no don’t I’m the original, or tried to, before the clone shot him. Why exactly is more of a mystery but possibly because Jackman thought he couldn’t trust what would happen if more than one of him were alive (the whole fight for control thing with his body double plays into this I guess).
So I think that every time Jackman flipped the switch it was 50-50 whether he’d be moved or stay in the spot. If he was moved, the trapdoor opens quick enough that the clone can’t escape and if not, he knows drowning will be painless, because Michael Caine told him it was like going home. Only that ended up being a lie, and so Jackman ended up playing roulette with his life dozens and dozens of times and died an agonising death if it didn’t go right.
But what’s more, the Jackman at the end says “never knowing if he would be the one etc” meaning that Jackman has possibly survived multiple attempts, or at least the very last one when the clone died.
I think the point of the ending is actually that exact sentiment. It focuses on Jackmans lifeless corpse and we now know there are hundreds, who all died in agony. We spent the film figuring out Borden’s trick and through a perspective that he was the protagonist and the moral victory. When actually we weren’t looking for the secret plot that Jackman was the true magician in the end.
We wanted to be fooled.
It wasn’t 50/50 the one in the machine always got dropped, the clone just hoped he was the original because of the continuity of their memories.
Love the Primer reference. Bravo.
Went through a phase where i rewatched the directors commentary & the movie probably like 10 times within a year to fully grasp it
I think Nolan could release half of tenet as a trailer and I still wouldn't have a clue what was going on
Watching a review of an awesome movie like The Prestige was like a natural antidote for enduring the Transformers series.
I was expecting at least 99 more references to Hugh Jackman as "The Greatest Showman" than this Caravan of Garbage video contained. Unsubscribe.
:(
i LOVE the idea that Angier comes into possession of a device that can DUPLICATE ANYTHING, including human life -- an infinite money, infinite energy, infinite resource machine -- and he uses it to perform tacky magic tricks that he expects people to assume are fake. It's so bonkers in its lack of perspective. But that's how obsession works. It's a credit to the story, IMO, not a plot hole.
I remember in my High School Film Studies class, our teacher chose to screen The Illusionist when we all made it clear we preferred The Prestige. We nearly rioted, but then a curtain opened and a TV on a cart was revealed. We politely applauded.
Angier vs. Borden at the end was hilarious🤣🤣
You touched on the 'knot issue' I'd never thought about before, bravo.
You didn't mention the wife's suicide because she (?) realized her husband were lowkey twins
I don't think she realized they were twins. If that was the case they could have worked that out.
It seemed more that she finally realized that the reason he didn't mean it when he said he loved her was because he was "having an affair" with his assistant, and when she straight up asks him whether he loves her he tells her straight up he doesn't. Which, to her, was saying he cared more for some woman than the wife he married and the child they brought into the world.
The conversation with the assistant after the wife's suicide has her say the wife wanted to talk to her but was too afraid. She asks him what she wanted to say, and the twin responds with his "part of me loved her, part of me loved you" bit, which suggests that's what she wanted to bring up, but that doesn't mean it's what the wife actually knew or suspected.
@@kyuubinaruto17 Maybe both reasons, and she was just tired with the bs
I love the story about Christopher Nolan saying I wouldn’t make this movie without David Bowie… as it’s a very brief cameo he wrote, it’s a huge flex and amounts to him saying “I really wanna meet David Bowie.”
As a Bowie fanboy. My focus was *biased*
The Prestige is his worst album.
He killed it as Tesla. I would love an entire movie about Tesla with Bowie as the star
That would be some magic trick.
The original jackman is always transported to somewhere else and the copy replaces him (it's a transporting machine that happens to also leave a copy). The evil copy knew that after he killed the original the first time. that's why he kept killing the one in the machine in his shows! he wanted the prestige. But at the end of the movie he says he didn't know which one he's going to be, so ... :D
I watched this over and over as a kid and only recently I understood what was going on in this movie 😂 also you should do the illusionist next week😂
omg the timing is amazing, i just watched this again the other night
Of course mason is obsessed with the beards and moustaches 😂
We never really know what knot Christian Bale ties, it's never established what the knots look like or how they are tied, we are just given mentions of the names of two knots, one that is said to be safe and one that is considered risky. In the scene he starts to tie one, she gives him a look, and he re-ties it differently. We don't know if he started the good one and she was encouraging him to try the other, or if she was giving him a look to say "do it properly." The brilliance is that it plays to our prejudices, the movie, especially on the first viewing, sets us to suspect Christian Bale and sympathize with Hugh Jackman. We believe without clear evidence that Bale actively did the wrong thing. Whichever twin did tie the knot may in fact not remember which knot he completed as he did clearly START both, and the traumatic event would make his question every move he had made. We're led to see Jackman as a tragic good guy who loses his wife, and Bale as the villain who seems like a crazy person with a manic personality. By the end we learn that Bale is actually two people with different personalities, and Jackman has gone mad, becoming so obsessed with their magic rivalry that it isn't about his wife anymore, and even Michael Caine's character, who blamed Christian Bale for the wife's death, thinks Jack man has gone too far by the end.
Heard a theory about this movie recently that blew my mind, and it makes so much sense, and if it's what the Nolans actually intended, then this movie is just a masterpiece of storytelling sleight of hand and is low-key Nolan's best movie. And I'm a HUGE fan of The Dark Knight, so that's big coming from me.
The teleportation machine didn't actually work. Think about it... everything else about this story is totally realistic. It's not a science fiction movie. The teleportation/cloning stuff being real is a pretty big leap for the story to take, when the movie is otherwise totally about... magic tricks! ... aka, deception. Convincing people that something extraordinary is possible, when it's really just an illusion.
The first thing to realize is that Angier's diary that Borden is reading? Almost everything in it is bullshit that Angier made up to trick Borden. Angier's a MAJORLY unreliable narrator in this movie. Tesla did actually work on a teleportation machine... but he abandoned it. Not because it was too dangerous, as Angier claims... but because it didn't work. The real part of the conversation that we do see between Angier and Tesla, Tesla essentially tells him that he's just obsessed. But through Angier's unreliable narration, we're convinced this scene is Tesla just giving a fair warning before proceeding... but the reality was most likely that Tesla told him he's crazy and this isn't going to work. And Tesla was right. As usual.
The ACTUAL way Angier did the trick? The same way he did it the first time. He used the actor double they found. We're left to assume that he left or they let him go because he was difficult and whatnot, and Angier wasn't happy with doing the trick that way... but no. Angier kept using him, he just started doing a better job of keeping him hidden... even from us. THAT'S who dies in the tank that Borden is framed for. The drowning only actually happened once. For every other performance, the actor probably just fell into a crash mat like we saw in the earlier version of the trick. That's why he's freaking out as he drowns... it's not an Angier clone pretending for Borden's benefit. It's the actor freaking out about drowning in a tank he didn't expect to be there this time, because he was expecting a crash mat again.
The times we see the drowning happening during Angier's explanation/confession montage? All just imagined images to convince us that Angier's claims were real. Those scenes we see in flashback of Angier using the machine the first time, shooting the duplicate, then "going into the machine every night, not knowing if I'd be dead or be the prestige..." ALL of that is bullshit that Angier is feeding Borden to keep him believing that he actually achieved something, other than framing Borden's twin. He needs him to believe the teleportation machine actually worked. He convinces Cutter of this too, because he doesn't want Cutter knowing that he murdered a real man, the actor that Cutter himself found and brought to Angier. Telling him that he just killed a clone of himself makes it seem less horrible. He doesn't want anybody knowing how the trick was REALLY done.
All the tanks we see at the end? They're all empty, if you look closely. The only one with an "Angier" in it is the one with the dead actor still in it, which is the only one Nolan focuses clearly on to give us some misdirection into thinking all the other tanks have the same. They don't. That's what Borden is realizing at the end. He turns around and looks closely at the rest of the tanks for the first time, realizing they're empty. Angier didn't have a real teleportation machine... but he DID succeed in pulling off the greatest magic trick. Convincing everybody, even us the audience... that the teleportation machine was real.
If this is the Nolans' actual intent (or Christopher Priest's, though I'm pretty sure the book is pretty different, and honestly this feels totally like Johnathan Nolan's type of storytelling, based on season 1 of Westworld and its endless twists and deeper levels to things)... then wow. Just wow. Amazingly well done, because yeah... everybody seems to come away from this movie thinking the teleportation machine was real, and that the brilliant reveal is all about how the great length Angier went to was killing himself every night. But the actual reveal is that the great length he went to was murdering an innocent man and lying to everybody, including Cutter. When Cutter tells him that drowning is agony, we're left to assume that Angier's look of guilt is him realizing what he was subjecting the different versions of himself to every night... but it's actually his guilt about what he did to the actor. "It takes everything." is referring to his morality about being a murderer just frame Borden and steal his trick while lying to everybody just to keep the secret... not to killing himself.
This is why Cutter's narration tells us "You won't find (the real answer). You're not really looking. You want to be fooled." This narration comes as the hats are shown, then over the final images of the tanks.
We won't realize the tanks are empty, because we're not really looking at them. We won't realize the hats weren't really cloned, because we're not really looking at reality when we see them. That's another figment of Angier's imagination in the diary. We want to believe the teleportation machine was real, because it's fun to believe in outlandish things like that. We want magic to be real. We don't want to realize the real horror and relatively mundane explanation for what happened... We want the movie to fool us. And it did.
But the REALLY brilliant thing about it is that it works either way. The movie is great and works whether you believe the teleportation was real or not. You can fall for the fake twist and unreliable narration, and still enjoy the movie and feel like you got the reveal and everything. Then years later, someone on Quora asks "What's the most misunderstood plot device in a movie?" and someone responds with a brilliant breakdown of this theory about the teleportation machine, and my mind is blown so much I have to spread it to others to help appreciate this movie even more. Amazing.
I couldn’t have said it any better my self man fantastic analogy and I’m on the same boat with you with all of this
Just rewatch the last scene again. While we dont get a close look at the background tanks there seems to be almost human looking shadows in them. Could they be dummy's? Who knows.
Except how could he keep performing if the double is the one that Borden is framed for? The double drowns and then he does more shows? Doesn’t hold up
@@HealthySkepticism777 he doesn't do anymore shows after the framing as he is "dead" this theory is saying that every other show would have used a crashmat not a tank
A movie with magicians, Hugh Jackman, & Scarlett Johansson, man I love Scoop.
Kingdom Hearts and the hearltess/nobodies... Brilliant!