The Prestige

So I finally saw The Prestige on Saturday. I had forgotten that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, of Batman Begins and Memento fame, both of which were excellent. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who in my opinion played an excellent Batman, are competing magicians. The Prestige refers to the third and final stage of a good illusion. The kicker, if you will.

David Bowie does an excellent job playing Nikola Tesla, who instead of having a brief cameo like I was expecting, was actually fairly central to the plot. Apparently he has developed teleportation technology, except instead it turns out to be duplication technology. The illusionists are interested, of course, because it makes for impossible feats, and begin to understand the implications of having clones running around.

The Tesla Technology looks excellent. In the trailers for the movie you only ever really see this wooden cabinet that is the receiving end of the tele-duplicator, but the initation pad is under a huge steel ball pulsating with huge streams of electricity. There is a kind of Tesla stage-show indoors with more impressive streamers.

Michael Caine plays kind of a backstage engineer and I like how he made a clear distinction between the two prestidigitators, and Tesla, the actual wizard. Let's refer to Arthur C. Clarke's 3 laws of prediction, care of Wikipedia:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
   possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
   impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
   little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.