Were you watching closely? An explanation of The Prestige. (spoilers)

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2007)

The Prestige is a beautifully intricate movie with a very disappointing end. Or at least that was what I thought as I watched the "Deus ex machina" that the Nolan brothers decided to pull at the last minute to extricate themselves from a plot that, perhaps, was starting to spin out of control from some many "twists and turns".
However, I couldn't keep my mind from the last few lines of the movie that seemed to speak directly to the viewer. Were we wanting to be fooled by the lightning and thunder of the Tesla machine, because the true explanation of the trick is just too simple and uninteresting? And so it dawned on me the idea that the Tesla Machine doesn't really work. That the Prestige is not a sci-fi film, but that it is 100% realistic. That, in fact, one of its many ideas is that behind all the hocus-pocus of magic lie simple and oftentimes disappointing explanations.
So, what follows is my opinion of what really happened. I think it can provide for an interesting reinterpretation of many of the film's scenes and dialogs.
I believe Tesla, a man with evident showmanship as depicted in his public exhibition in the Albert Hall, ended up agreeing to build the transporting machine for Angier, in order to fund his research. Not being able of constructing such an impossible device, he planned with his magic-enthusiast assistant a little bit of a magic show of their own. The cats and the hats scene was staged by them to led Angier to believe that the machine worked as a replicator.
The scientific-naïve Angier was played upon, with the two men of science humoring him with good-natured irony. For indeed Tesla did not really want to swindle Angier. He did build and supplied him with the only possible machine that could be built: an illusionist's contraption.
Angier tested his new acquisition and realized that no such replicating machine existed, and that Borden must have been using a double all along. He understood now, however, the deceptive power of science, and returned to London with the idea of employing the machine in a new trick and in the enactment of his final revenge upon Borden. Ironically, his new trick was not new at all, but was the same old simple trick as before. Whenever Borden was not present, Angier himself appeared in the prestige, being finally able to personally receive the audience's applause at the end.
He knew Borden would come to see the act, so whenever he spotted him in the audience we would present the Transported Man himself and his double would only appear for "the prestige" far away in the balcony, and therefore not recognizable by Borden, who was now starting to be taken in, as Angier had been, by the power of the "true magic" of science.
In the day Borden came intending to expose the trick, Angier, who was watching for this moment, spotted him among the volunteers from the public and quickly had placed the water-tank under the trap door.
However, things turned for Angier when Cutter went to see him and learned of the truth. Upon meeting "Lord Caldlow", the pragmatically minded Cutter finally understood the true nature of the trick. In his mind, Angier had gone too far that time by killing an innocent man and using Cutter himself to incriminate and sentence to death their former colleague.
Cutter suspected, from the first Transported Man, that "Borden" might have a twin, which he confirmed when Fallon was kidnapped. He thought the only fair thing to do was to give the surviving Borden the chance of retribution.
In the warehouse, a disenchanted Cutter sets the tone for the final sequence: "Take a minute to consider your achievement." He then tells him about the sailor who said drowning was like going home. Angier had taken comfort in that thought, not only in connection with his wife death, but to appease his mind for the murder he committed.
Angier, who had struggled with the idea of drowning, upon seeing Cutter leave instinctively turns his lantern towards a water-tank, and what does he see? A corpse strongly resembling himself. In a split second he understands that it must have been put there by Cutter. He even knows how he did it: "No one cares about the man in the box".
Cutter, who was a master of characterization, obtained and characterized several corpses (men in boxes no one cares about) to resemble Angier, the effect being aided by the obfuscation in the warehouse and of the water-tanks themselves.
However, Angier was still not able to understand the purpose of all this. It was then that in entered Fallon, who tells him about the true nature of his relation to "Borden" and how they performed their trick, not before shooting Angier in the chest.
Angier, a dying man, now understands that the twin was let in by Cutter in order to kill him, but also that Cutter in his sympathy did not wish to dispossess him of his strange "achievement", which he so greatly prized. And so Angier takes advantage of the scenario Cutter prepared for him and proceeds to play on Borden the final part of his trick, telling him the imaginary story of his first use of the machine and the "price" that he had paid for his art.
For he knew well that he had paid a great price  an innocent man's life and his own. But in the game of illusion and masterful deceit, Borden's secret disclosed and his own preserved, he had been the victor  and he had, after all, performed a most wonderful magic trick in this "solid, solid world".
In the end, a close shoot of one the tanks is shown. Not just any tank, but a special one. The tank where Root, Angier's double, lies.