Interesting Duality Concept on Dark Competitive Spirits of Professional Magicians

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2015)

Before the successful of their big blockbusters, the Nolan's siblings explore the world of stage magicians by summarising the magic performances into three parts - the pledge, the turn and the prestige, which the movie further develops based on the structures although it starts off slowly with its own unique beginning. It seems that in most Nolan's film, the ending scene always appears at the opening but his narrative style however manages to make audiences to forget that regardless on the complexity of the content he tries to confuse us, it is actually a straightforward plot with the key answers already revealed indirectly at the first scene. The performances of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are extremely outstanding, thanks to the character developments that allow them to be both the antagonist and protagonist at the same time due to their eagerness for glory that they have eroded not only the morality of this magical great art, but to sacrifice their own lives and the one they love. The duality is a brilliant central concept of the film extracted in two different ways on both leads, it never stops engaging but to challenge the mindset of the viewers with several dark twisted plots and ambiguity. Although with a bit of weaker scores (due to no Hans Zimmer), Nolan's smart piece of magical art is interesting to stress that the trick of victory comes only when a person overlook and think that he has already won the rival.