Another Nolan masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2013)

Christopher Nolan has made many fantastic films. Not including the Dark Knight trilogy, he has created a reputation to keep you guessing until the very end of the movie, and often after you have left the theater. "The Prestige" follows the vein of Nolan's earlier works such as "Shallow Grave" and "Memento", in which the twists come fast and furious during the last third of the film. To summarize, Hugh Jackman (Robert Angier) and Christian Bale (Alfred Borden) play magicians who were once friends and now are out to ruin one another's career and life. Nolan creates narratives that intertwine from each magician's point of view, as both Bale and Jackman have each other's journals and are reading what they are believing to be each other's secrets. The time period is fantastic to see(late 1800's) with costumes and architecture breathing life into the film. Jackman plays an intense and determined role of Angier, while Bale often comes across as calculating and manipulative. The direction by Nolan was excellent in that he creates a story in which you genuinely like one character and loathe the other in the first half of the movie, and then your mind is changed the second half. That impressed me and kept me very interested to see the conclusion and how each character's obsession deteriorates their lives. It is a film you watch several times, as you get much more out of it after a second viewing, knowing the twists and seeing the subtle clues that Nolan cleverly waves in front of you. And of course, you don't know what hit you until the credits start rolling.