The awesome hidden truth!

Rating: 8/10 (18 October 2017)

The whole movie is a massive magic trick and it deserves a second viewing just to comprehend the whole thing, which seems to be a constant thing regarding Nolan's movies.
The movie is about two magicians (Bale and Jackman) who compete with each other as to who has the best trick, escalating to insanely extreme situations. Bale's biggest trick for example was that he had a twin brother and they swapped places the whole time! The twins went as far as cutting one's finger to match his twin brother. This was pretty awesome, especially if you know that real life magicians have gone to similar lengths. James Randy for example used to carry a piece of paper in his pocket for years. That piece of paper had "today's" date on it, saying that "today I will die". If he had a fatal accident, would you believe that he predicted his own death or that he wrote a piece of paper each day for years?! Talking about devotion!
The movie explores that devotion and the sacrifices someone must do to deceive others. But the greatest deception of the movie was fooling the audience itself! The movie is very realistic but the explanation about the cloning machine was not something I could accept, so I looked around to see what other people thought about the ending. In my research pretty much everyone was agreeing with the explanation given, that Tesla gave Jackman a cloning machine, and Jackman in his every act kills one of his clones (or dies himself). That's pretty awesome and the audience bought it. But it's a lie nobody really saw! Michael Cain gives the secret 10 minutes before the end. Earlier he told a story about a sailor but he reveals now that the story was a lie. This is a hint that Jackman's story was also a lie, and Bale and the audience bought it.
Cain tells the audience in the end that you don't want to know what happened, you want to be fooled. So what happened? Over the course of the movie, many bad things happen. Bale kills Jackman's wife and Jackman shoots Bale's fingers. Bale takes Johansson to his side, manipulates Root (Jackman's double) and humiliates Jackman on stage while braking his leg. Jackman kidnaps and buries Bale's friend to blackmail him for his secret. The secret was planned and Bale sends Jackman to a wild goose chase to America. There, Tesla fools Jackman with some hats and some cats to get away with the money.
Jackman returns the favor by giving a fake diary to the imprisoned Bale. Everything regarding Tesla's machine, is only known from Jackman's diary. And knowing that Bale lied in his diary, then surely Jackman lied in his as well.
So to wrap this up. Jackman was obsessed to find Bale's secret and it was only revealed to him in his last breath. The Tesla story was a lie and the machine never worked (that would be completely unrealistic, even for Tesla), but Jackman used it in his favor. Jackman used and killed Root to frame Bale. Bale dies, but his twin brother takes revenge by shooting Jackman.
Almost perfect score because it fooled almost everyone!