"My liege, I did deny no prisoners..."

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2011)

I generally like Nolan's movies, but there isn't much good to say about The Prestige. It could be worse, of course, but...
The plot is hardly interesting enough to go into details. Suffice it to say that "do the ends justify the means?" is really a no-brainer here because the means are tremendously out of proportion. The conflict between the two magicians has trivial origins and is finally resolved by a trivial gunshot and a trivial hanging. So what was that laws-of-physics-bending-McGuffin for? (I mean the cloning machine.) Not to mention ciphers and lies, intrigues and counter-intrigues, kidnappings and (self-)mutilations. They could simply have a duel - next morning at sunrise would do just fine.
Most characters have no past at all and the movie gives no clue as to how and why have they become what they are. I'm really trying to find epithets to describe them other than "dull" and "one-dimensional" but nothing comes to mind. And Tesla... well, this is just plain embarrassing. He's perhaps the most likable character and I like how David Bowie portrayed him but unfortunately he's not the inventor and scientist Tesla, he's the urban myth wizard Tesla. *sigh* I bet if this movie were set in the XVII century and featured Sir Isaac Newton, we'd see the proverbial apple...
And when a drunk actor hired by Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) suddenly cites a line from "Henry V" there's a distinct feeling that, indeed, with $40m budget Christopher Nolan could pick a better story. Yeah, one of Shakespeare's plays for example.
5/10: Like I said, it could be worse. The problem is that it could most certainly be better.