Better the Second Time Around

Rating: 8/10 (19 August 2007)

The first time I saw this film, I was somewhat disappointed with it. The imagery is quite beautiful throughout, and I enjoyed the bits where they revealed how certain magical tricks worked (the bird vanishing/reappearing trick was particularly good). These scenes do a very good job of showing you how everything is an illusion, and you need to figure out what's going on behind the scenes (which seems to be the obsession of both magicians, played ably by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman). But I focused a bit too much on that aspect of it and was disappointed with one aspect of the latter half, where all rational/realistic explanation fails and the movie becomes somewhat fantastic. This, I felt, compromised the earlier promise of the movie to reveal how everything was simply an illusion that could be explained by ordinary means.
The second time I saw the film, however, I appreciated it significantly more. Instead of viewing the movie as a story about how two men are constantly trying to outdo each other by building progressively more complex illusions, I saw it as a cautionary tale about obsession (a motif which I put on the back-burner the first time around since its full impact doesn't hit until the very end of the film). The lengths to which BOTH of the men go to achieve their art is thrilling and terrifying--and in this light, the movie is an engaging success.