The film ends with Cutter describing the fateful Transported Man magic trick to a little girl, who audiences now know to be Borden's daughter Jess. Borden and Angier both master a trick called The Transported Man, in which the magician appears to travel between two wardrobes on opposite ends of the stage, almost instantly. The film's final act reveals each man's outlandish take on the trick, with Borden mastering The Transported Man first with a sleight-of-hand strategy.
The ending of the film reveals that the identity of Borden is actually assumed by twin brothers. On stage, one brother is located in each wardrobe. They take the deception so seriously that, when one brother loses a couple of fingers from a gunshot wound, the other cuts off his fingers to match. In essence, there is nothing flashy about Borden's approach here — the trick is grounded and straight to the point, backed up by the Borden twins' painstaking approach to detail.
On the other hand, Angier's mission to master The Transported Man takes him stateside to meet the famed inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla. He believes that Tesla built a transportation machine for Borden - a belief that quickly turns out to be false - but Tesla still manages to build a transportation machine for Angier.
This machine duplicates any object or living being placed inside and drops the copy a short distance away, meaning each time the trick is performed, Angier is cloned. This means the original Angier falls through a trap door into a water tank and drowns each time the trick is performed, with the new duplicate appearing somewhere in the theater to delight Angier's audiences.
The trick, or more accurately Faustian-style bargain, is what finally earns Angier's the audience's adoration, which is what his character has long been searching for.
In short, Alfred and Fallon Borden don't technically exist, instead acting as two separate identities taken on by a set of twin brothers. As one brother says in the film, they live two halves of a full life. They're so dedicated to this craft that they each sacrifice a potentially well-rounded life in order to succeed in their chosen career. To keep up with the ruse successfully pulling off The Transported Man, each twin takes turns alternately playing Borden and his stage engineer and right-hand man Fallon.
Each brother lives different lives when portraying Alfred. One is madly in love with Sarah, the woman with whom they marry and have a child with.
The other is in love with their assistant Olivia Scarlett Johansson and treats Sarah cruelly. Borden's wildly contradictory behavior actually clues in Sarah to the fact that he is two people. When one twin is wrongfully tried and hanged for the assumed death of Angier, his rival believes he's finally beaten Borden once and for all. This is not the case when the surviving twin finds and fatally shoots Angier, as both he and the audience realize that Borden successfully pulled off The Transported Man for years by being one half of a set of twin brothers.
In essence, Angier was so caught up with the big picture that he failed to look for one of the most obvious answers, mirroring the audience's journey through Christopher Nolan's film. The Prestige 's opening monologue describes the three acts of a magic trick, while also cleverly foreshadowing the structure of the film.
The first act of a trick, the pledge, shows you something ordinary. The second act, the turn, makes it do something extraordinary, such as disappearing. Basically, color wins and black-and-white loses. Kline played Dave Kovic, a temp agency runner in DC who moonlights as a body double for a lame, amorous president, Bill Mitchell. As Mitchell, Kline yucked it up as a lame duck politician more interested in having affairs and showing up at car dealerships than actually legislating.
But when Mitchell has a stroke, Kovic becomes a long-term alternative, faking president. Kline actually seemed to be a likable leader of the people here. As cowboy prez Bill Mitchell, Kevin Kline gets to be a yahoo that rides a pig like an elected jackass!
It is way more fun to abuse power, right? Nostalgia aside, how about the hype surrounding this movie? Watch his audition and try not to laugh. Perhaps if Jiff received more screen time we would have received a different kind of movie and, more importantly, a funnier one. Best Performance Jiff all the way. On one side, you have respected head-gamer script whiz Charlie Kaufman.
He is panic, he is logic, he is human worry and the day-to-day struggle of just being. On the right side, somewhat, is Donald. Dopey, pot-bellied Donald Kaufman. He promises. Cage embraced and embodied with a small arsenal of prosthetics and wigs the brothers Kaufman, creating two highly insightful performances that represented two sides of thinking, on well, everything.
Yeah, yeah, everybody loves Donald. Smartly, Roberts lets her co-stars wink at the audience. The Prestige is the best kind of magician movie. His broadness serves a purpose, though, a counterbalance to the subtleties Bale had to weave into his secret twins. He just never quite convinces as Angier.
Playing twins like the Winklevosses offers an altogether different kind of challenge: finding nuance within carbon copies. Often uncredited for his work on The Social Network is Josh Pence, the actor who performed alongside Hammer when both twins were onscreen.
To help draw distinction between the characters, Hammer and Pence worked with an acting coach to develop identical movements. Damn, were we fanboys pumped for Tron: Legacy back in What came out was a decent if mostly forgettable movie, albeit one with Bridges playing two unique roles. The first character Bridges portrays is game programmer Kevin Flynn, who has been trapped in the very game he created. Alongside his son Garrett Heglund and program character Quorra Olivia Wilde , the three of them must do battle against an evil program who looks a lot like Flynn from back in the original Tron.
Thanks to the magic? It has to be Bridges as the older, wiser Flynn, if only by default. You know that high-pitched, Jewish granny voice Adam Sandler loves to dip into? It wouldn't work without him. But his entire existence feels too coincidental. Scarlett Johansson's Olivia explains to Angier that she found the alcoholic in a bar, and because Root is a former actor, he's already used to performing on stage. But what are the chances of the assistant wandering into a bar and finding Root at the exact time that Angier needs to find a doppelganger?
We're not saying Root was part of Borden's plot to ruin Angier, nor is he a clone, but it's just too much of a coincidence in the movie for the audience to take it seriously. By the end of The Prestige , we see Angier has become consumed by the fame and money that his new version of the Transported Man illusion gives him. He's become dedicated to hiding the secrets of all the drowned clones, even hiring a blind crew to work with him, so they don't know what it is they're helping with.
But considering he's meant to be a relatively smart individual, it's surprising he never once thinks of making one clone to work with him on doing the original version of the trick. Since it would literally be a second version of himself, he wouldn't have the same issues that he had with the alcoholic double, Mr.
They'd both be able to share in the glory, swapping roles with each show because it would be the same Angier. Obviously, the device built by Nikola Tesla adds to the spectacle of the performance, so it's understandable why he wants to keep it. But the moral weight of not knowing if he was going to be the man in the box or the one facing the applause would surely cripple Angier's mental state before too long.
The Prestige 's ending is a truly bittersweet one. While one Borden is hanged for supposedly killing Robert Angier, the mysterious Lord Caldlow whose name is mentioned throughout the film is revealed to be Angier's real identity. Much like the Borden twins' dedication to living one life, Caldlow has been living as Angier for decades in his attempt to become a world renowned magician.
Although Angier won the hearts and minds of his audience, he dies after being shot by Borden. In his final moments, it's clear that he regrets everything, but it's a little too late as he passes away surrounded by the corpses of all the clones he murdered. It'd be easy to read the surviving Borden as the "winner" of the film, since he gets to live life looking after his brother's daughter, Jess.
But his dedication to the magical cause has ripped his brother away from him as well as his love of being a stage magician. It's all very bittersweet. Warner Bros. The opening reveals the ending Warner Bros.
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