The Good

This is a great movie featuring gifted actors and a gifted director.

The Bad

I wish there would have been more featurettes focusing on magicians.

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are great friends in The Prestige. They work together as magicians, each one complementing the other. Then one night, a trick goes terribly wrong and Angier vows to get revenge on Borden. Once that is exacted, we see these two men going after one another's secrets in the most sly of ways. Their goal is to constantly one up each other until one day Borden performs a trick that Angier cannot believe. Determined to find out more about it, Angier procures his journal and this sets him on an adventure that gives him both more and less than he bargained for.

Told in a nonlinear fashion which begins with Borden being put in jail for killing Angier, The Prestige is one of the most engaging films to come to screens in a long time. This film examines magic, it shows us how certain tricks are done, but the whole time you are watching the movie you come to realize that a magic trick is being played on you as a viewer. Filled with rich performances from Jackman, Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine and others, The Prestige is easily one of the best films of the year.

Features

The Director's Notebook

Comprised of 5 featurettes, I sadly felt a little letdown by this section. With titles like "Conjuring the Past," "Tesla: The Man Who Invented The Twentieth Century," and "Metaphors of Deception," I thought Christopher Nolan was going to take us deeper into this film. Unfortunately, these featurettes seem like they are little more than EPK pieces to compliment this movie. Sure, it was nice to hear about how they achieved the look of this film, and it was great learning about Tesla, but I wanted to see tricks... I wanted more magic.

The Art of The Prestige Gallery

There are a bevy of images from this film to scroll through. They are broken up into sections like "Film," "Behind the Scenes" and "Costumes and Sets." These are fun to look at, but galleries sometimes seem like cop-outs to me. They seem so easy to put together and rather than look at these galleries, I would simply like to watch the movie again. Judge for yourselves, but ultimately the bonus features were a somewhat of a letdown.

Video

2.35:1 - HD Video in 1080p resolution. This movie looked very rich when I saw it in the theater and it looked extremely rich on Standard DVD. Seeing it here, I was wondering how much the Blu-ray experience would improve on that. Let me just say, this movie looks terrific. They have gone out their way to give this film a timeless feel and because of that we feel familiar with the movie's setting even though we can't quite place where it is. There are a lot of browns and greens employed and it seems like Christopher Nolan's intent is that people will focus on the main actors as opposed to anything in the background. Hint: This is all pretext for the trick that Nolan is playing on the audience. Blu-ray doesn't really do anything to diminish this, but it does provide a very clear picture to a film that seems to love playing with our assumptions.

Audio

English: PCM 5.1. English, French, Spanish. This is one of those movies that has benefited a great deal from being a newer movie on to this new format. I say that because the audio, at all times, regardless of what was going on on-screen or in a scene, sounded terrific. The mix seemed to create a very full sound by bringing all of these elements together. Whether we were seeing a trick being performed in a hall, or watching one of the main characters walk through the street, the audio was never quiet but not because of how my speakers were set up. It was as if you could really hear the room where the tricks were being executed, and the awe of the crowd was at times overpowering.

Package

Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are presented on this front cover with an hour glass like image of Scarlett Johansson between the them. They have utilized a very ominous black background to enhance this imagery. The back cover continues this motif somewhat, there is a description of what this film is about, a Special Features listing, a cast list and system specs. I think I am slowly being worn down by these Blu-ray covers.

Final Word

Even though I figured out one half of The Prestige magic trick 20 minutes before the movie ended, I still loved this film dearly. As I am not the kind of person that watches movies with an eye toward figuring them out, I became totally engaged in this film. I came to it sick, I was tired, I was sitting in a theater that was crowded, and I managed to block all of that out and completely get lost in everything that this movie was putting across. In addition to that, I was so intrigued by all the magic being done in the film, that I bought a set of tricks for myself and I am currently studying the craft when I can.

Another aspect of this movie that I think can really engage viewers is this idea of the magicians living for their tricks. These guys are such a special group of people. I say this because of how they live their lives. They refuse to explain how their tricks are done. They are usually highly intelligent. And lastly, they always seem to be looking for ways to improve their craft. Which in a lot of ways is exactly what The Prestige feels like.

On Blu-ray disc I think this movie looked incredible. Christopher Nolan has presented a very dark world (both in color tones and subject matter), but due to the format of these new discs I didn't feel like the filmmaker had to sacrifice anything for this release. With so much space on the diskette itself, it was like giving The Prestige a chance to breath. I noticed things I had never seen both in the theater and when I watched this movie on standard DVD. I find myself constantly amazed at the quality that this next generation technology offers.

This film is made by one of the world's best filmmakers, it stars many of our finest actors, and at all times they seem to be trying to perfect what is they are doing in this film.

The Prestige was released October 19, 2006.