3 illogical mistakes

Rating: 7/10 (22 January 2007)

3 (illogical) mistakes probably deliberately made by the director.
The first two are made for the benefit of the story (you have to go along with it):
1) When Borden's engineer is kidnapped by Angier and Cutter he's questioned. They don't find out he's missing two fingers, he has a false beard and is Borden's twin brother?
2) When Angier is doing his final act Borden's mind never crossed the idea Angier is working again with his lookalike?
Then the third mistake is made out of marketing/commercial reasons (also known : artistic freedom of the director) :
3) In the lost shot we see a copy (made by the machine) of Angier drown in a water-tank. This is a blink to the audience of the movie : does the machine really work or not? Open end! Discus it, talk about it, search for a logical explanation,.... extra publicity for the movie....etc
It's like the manager of Elvis once said : "I don't care what they say about Elvis, as long as they talk about him".
By the way the audience sees Angier make a trip to Colorado Springs, meeting professor Tesla, seeing the machine duplicate (living) things. We all see these things according the diary of Angier ; a diary specially made to misguide Borden so he will give up his secret. For all we know Angier did meet Tesla, saw that he was an impostor and made up a fake diary to get even with Borden. (Borden gave him deliberately a false clue with the name 'Tesla')
Remember The Usual Suspects : Kevin Spacey made up a story for Chazz Palminteri about 'Keyser Söze'.... etc. At the end of the movie we realize that 95% of it is just a made up story by a crook. Well, probably 95% of the diary of Angier is made up as well.
Angier waits until Borden goes looking in the basement to settle the score with him and Angier's lookalike.
Voilà.