Upcoming movie about magic

[Swami]

I'm not in any way skillful about magic or sleight of hand, but I've always been interested in it. You conjurers and tricksters out there might be interested in a movie, called 'The Prestige'.

It would be interesting to get your feedback on the trailer. And when the movie comes out, it would be more interesting to get your feedback on that. Obviously, it's just a movie, and therefore fiction, but how much of it is accurate?

You can find the trailer online (I saw it at the apple website), but I can't link to it, since I'm a lurker and it won't let me post links until I have 15 posts or more.

[fabian_lidman]

Looks exciting. Accurate? They say in the trailer that there's "real magic" involved. Apart from Kenton Knepper, nobody believes in that any more.

[Stir]

The book "The Prestige" by Christopher Priest is excellent reading and is loaded with acurate information about the magic entertainment business ... theory, performance, methods, mentalism vs magic, and much more. It will be very difficult for the movie to live up to the book ... I suspect much of that accurate info will be lost or distorted.

[MagicFan]

Thanks for the “heads up”. It's good to see a movie about magicians during magic's golden age.

(The highest quality trailer takes a while to load even on DSL. Also, you must have the latest version of Quicktime (of course). My OS wasn't even up-to-date enought to run the latest QT, so I had to watch it on another computer.)

The film looks pretty good. It does look like they expose the vanshing birdcage, however. Also they do have to fall back on the old Hollywood cliche about one magician who has discovered "real" magic.

How accurate? The upside-down glass water tank trick shown in the trailer is based on Houdini’s Water Torture Illusion. There’s a Chinese magician that could be based on Chung Ling Soo. The electric light bulbs illusion could be based on Robert-Houdin, who did some early work with electricity. They’re mixing periods there, but it does seem to have some basis in history. Ricky Jay was probably the magic consultant, since he makes an appearance in the trailer, and, being a magic historian, he probably lent the movie a lot of authenticity as far as the magic goes (if not the accents).

On the plus side, it appears to do a good job of capturing the drama of magic. Movies about magicians are few and far between, even though magic has a lot of dramatic elements and a great history, so I am looking forward to seeing this.

[Admiral]

I've been looking forward to this movie for a while. It's directed by a fantastic director, Christopher Nolan, the director of Memento, Insomnia, and Batman Begins. It also has a great cast- Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, David Bowie, and Scarlett Johansson.

About the issue with "real magic"- it's not quite what it looks like. One of the main characters is Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie), who was a pioneering scientist of the time. It looks to me like the magic trick that the trailer refers to wasn't magic, but new science (my guess is that the trick involves teleportation). Still totally fictional, but much more interesting than real magic, and it lets the audience learn about Nikola Tesla, who is a very interesting character.

Anyway- my guess is that it's going to be a fantastic movie.

[Bob Klase]

Originally Posted by Admiral

About the issue with "real magic"- it's not quite what it looks like. One of the main characters is Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie), who was a pioneering scientist of the time. It looks to me like the magic trick that the trailer refers to wasn't magic, but new science (my guess is that the trick involves teleportation). Still totally fictional, but much more interesting than real magic, and it lets the audience learn about Nikola Tesla, who is a very interesting character.

I liked the book and look forward to seeing the movie.

What's is "new science"? If you write a book (or make a movie) and one of the characters is Thomas Edison, would it be "new science" if the Thomas Edison character invents faster than light travel? Would Frankenstein count as new science?

[Supercharts]

I saw the movie. Very good. As for real magic the movie has David Bowie playing the part of Tesla.

[Azrael 5]

Coo-eee there's a thread on this somewhere.I won't be seeing it on the basis of the silly Cockney accents of Baleman and Jackman>What was wrong with UK actors,exactly?

[rats]

Originally Posted by Azrael 5

Coo-eee there's a thread on this somewhere.I won't be seeing it on the basis of the silly Cockney accents of Baleman and Jackman>What was wrong with UK actors,exactly?

Er, Bale is from the UK.

Thoroughly enjoyed the film.

[Larry Lovage]

Quote:

About the issue with "real magic"- it's not quite what it looks like. One of the main characters is Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie), who was a pioneering scientist of the time. It looks to me like the magic trick that the trailer refers to wasn't magic, but new science (my guess is that the trick involves teleportation).

No, indeed. No "real magic". Only "bad science".

I'm sorry, as far as I'm concerned it really doesn't matter if it's set in the 19th Century, it's not acceptable in the 21st Century to create science fiction on the basis of 19th Century science. What Tesla is supposed to have invented (in the book/movie) is impossible six ways before breakfast. If it had been written in 1899, it is of course perfectly acceptable to reflect the knowledge and belief of the times, and to adapt the book "as is" (only this week I saw an extract of the original British movie of From the Earth to the Moon, made in 1967 while Apollo was actually ongoing, but correctly reflecting the (perfectly impossible) means for getting to the moon devised by Jules Verne.

It's almost impossible to discuss the demerits of this movie without revealing essentials of the plot, so I will have to use spoilers. People who have seen the film only to press the button, please!

My biggest problem with the film is that you learn about what Tesla might be working on for Angier about half way through the film, having already established that we are in a supposedly real world in which magicians do their tricks by astonishing feats of sleight of hand and misdirection supplemented by ingenious mechanical engineering. At this point, the average skeptical viewer will be saying, "Oh, no... it's 'real' magic!" But if you wait until the very end, you'll realise that the whole point was to making a tremendous coup de theatre at the very end of the film. That certainly works, but you can't help feeling that you were robbed because you thought at the half way point that the magic ruined the premise of the film.

I can't help wondering why so many important sequences involving the tricks were framed, shot and edited so badly. The first of these was the non-lethal version of the crushed cage trick. We never got a clear idea of how the proper cage worked, and we never saw properly how Borden (Bale) managed to sabotage it. This is not the film to be squeamish, and it was not aimed at an audience of children, so they should have shown more. And when Borden first does the Transported Man, we don't even see him transported! He throws the ball, goes through the door and then we cut to Angier (Jackman) sitting in the audience! What was that all about?

The following is spoilers of stuff you couldn't possibly guess from the trailers, so if you haven't seen the film and you've got this far, really do not press the button!!

That Borden had a twin was far too obvious. And again, Borden gets hanged, and then we cut to Angier getting shot. But Angier does his exposition bit, "A brother!", before we got to see that Borden is standing there holding the gun! Even if it was the director's intention that we knew there was a twin all along, doesn't mean you don't present the "magic trick" (being hanged and ... somehow getting out of it?). There! Right there would have been a magnificent Prestige - the very thing the whole effing movie is all about!! But Nolan threw all those opportunities away.

Another problem was the gaping plot hole created by having to use Borden's daughter as a bargaining chip. As it turns out in the end that Borden was in fact two people, only one of whom was getting hanged, it completely makes a nonsense of Borden wanting some lord he doesn't know to adopt her.

Another moan about the film wrecking the 'reality'. The revelation of one way of doing The Transported Man was that it's done by a double. Angier, Hugh Jackman's part, wants to duplicate the trick, so he goes and finds a double. The effing double was played by Jackman! This was one area where the film conceit of people who look vaguely like the lead actually looking so precisely like the lead that they are played by the same man, was utterly, utterly nonsense. Roger Rees was actually in the film, he could have played a reasonable double for Jackman!

I think Nolan got his head mixed up when making Memento. The narrative was told in flash forward and flash back in ways that just made it hard to follow, without those sequences in themselves being meaningful (as they were in Memento). Sometimes if you're developing character arcs like a growing mutual loathing and obsession, you're pretty much better doing it linearly!

[rats]

Larry Lovage, I agree with most of your criticisms while still enjoying the film, but…

I don’t see how the teleportation is any different to Star Trek. In fact I think that associating it with a real-life scientist will hopefully encourage viewers to look into what Tesla really achieved.

[Loopus]

Originally Posted by Larry Lovage

I'm sorry, as far as I'm concerned it really doesn't matter if it's set in the 19th Century, it's not acceptable in the 21st Century to create science fiction on the basis of 19th Century science.

Then you must hate the entire subgenre of steampunk, which is entirely based on this. Which is fine, but it's going a bit far to call it "unacceptable" when a lot of people enjoy the concept.

I agree with your general opinion, though. Getting Jackman to play his own character's double was cheap, and the shifting timelines served no purpose here. My main question at the end was, "How did Tesla get involved, again?" What luck for Angier than Borden just happened to make up a fake secret for his trick that involved someone who could actually make it really happen. And that Tesla didn't just tell him, "What are you talking about? I never made any machine for that man. Now either give me money or go away."

[Larry Lovage]

It's unacceptable if the film is not in itself part of the steampunk genre. Same applies to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic book Victorian fantasia with myriad impossibilities in it, and its tongue firmly in its cheek. Same with Wild, Wild West. Absolutely nothing to complain about there. But the premise of The Prestige was entirely realistic except for the one piece of impossible "science". And they made Nikola Tesla look like a mystic!

Never heard of steampunk, by the way.

Originally Posted by rats

Larry Lovage, I agree with most of your criticisms while still enjoying the film, but…

I don’t see how the teleportation is any different to Star Trek. In fact I think that associating it with a real-life scientist will hopefully encourage viewers to look into what Tesla really achieved.

The teleportation in Star Trek takes place in our future. We know all about the Uncertainty Principle, so much so that in response to "That's impossible!" claims from the more pedantic fans, they invented something called the Heisenberg Compensation Device, so that the transmogrification of every atom, electron and quark into pure energy and its reassembly without a thing out of place could seem partially plausible. All Tesla does is build a big version of one of his coils and throw energy at the subject. It's intrinsically impossible for his thing to work with all the knowledge we have now, let alone the fact that it apparently worked first time. It's not intrinsically impossible for the problems to have been solved by the 23rd Century. Even The Fly demonstrated the potential difficulties that might be involved with transporting organic live matter, but it simply doesn't feature with Tesla's machine - cats and people get duplicated perfectly and still alive, by what amounts to a huge Van de Graaf generator!

[Admiral]

Here's the central question- do you think that anyone (outside of the most ridiculous woos) actually walked out of the theater thinking that the movie accurately portrayed Tesla's work and that all the things done were possible? This was what was important to me, and in fact that's why I was happy it was portrayed so unrealistically- if it had been filled with stuff like "heisenberg compensators" people might have started to buy into it.

Cinema doesn't have some sort of obligation to reflect reality based on rules you assign it. You're saying "A film has to reflect the truth about historical scientists, although it CAN make things up about historical stuff that happened as long as it doesn't approach science, and it CAN make things up about the future as long as it makes proper allowances to make it scientifically feasible..." What kind of a rule is that? It's arbitrary and pointless- it's like people saying a film has to be true to a novel it's based on. How about this rule: "A film has to be good." If you want, you can add another (though this one's debatable): "A film has an obligation to society not to confuse or mislead people that watch it."

Do you think anyone who watched the Prestige was confused or misled? I certainly don't- have you heard from anyone who thinks that the science in Prestige is accurate? What DOES bother me are fans of, say, The Da Vinci Code or The X-Files who support the fictional assertions of each- both have spawned a subculture of people who support ridiculous ideas just because they saw them in a fictional context. (I have to add, by the way, that the difference between them is that The X-Files is, on its own, a great show, while The Da Vinci Code is a pretty lousy book and movie.)

Anyway, my point is this- I don't think you should judge a movie based on whether the science in it is possible, particularly not when the movie isn't going to mislead anyone about science and might (as some other forum members mentioned) even encourage people to look into Tesla's achievements. Have whatever critical opinion of the movie that you want (though I really liked it), but I don't think you should bring that in.