And I strongly disagree that The Prestige is “about” magic tricks.
For what it’s worth, yes. And both “twists” are given away in the opening chapters.
Absolutely, it’s a movie about obsession in various forms and the destruction it wreaks in two men’s lives. A tale as old as time, in some ways. I gotta side with the Prestige defenders in this thread, though I confess I am not unbiased - it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. But I can understand how someone, thinking they were getting one movie and finding it to be a totally different one, could feel cheated.
And it’s also very much about not wanting (or being able to) accept a simple explanation.
Several hours into it.
Your definition of simple is not mine. A science fiction hand-wave is much simpler than many other possible resolutions to what we had seen.
Did you watch the extended super long cut or something? Several hours?
The technology itself is not simple, but it’s the length that Angiers goes to because he won’t accept the simple truth behind Borden’s solution.
Well, there’s one point of contention right there - there’s nothing simple about this solution, and calling it a science fiction handwave drastically misrepresents its purpose in the story. The fact that you can flip a switch and suddenly there are two of something blows up the story - in a way that you think ruins the story, but in a way that makes things fascinatingly complex to me, and others. Again, I get it. It’s not the story you wanted, I’ve seen plenty of those. But the cloning device is more or less just a Pandora’s box, a device that Tesla warns Angiers that he should not mess with, and doing so has predictable results. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that laid its cards out, told me how it was going to perform its trick, and then still manages to fool me with misdirection. If that doesn’t work for you, I can see how it would seem to be a lesser film. Not everything is for everybody.
But hey, how about that Arrival, huh? Pretty good movie.
Hey, I didn’t bring Nolan into this thread :P
“It’s so simple, so easy–”
“No. Simple, maybe. But not easy.”
It is specifically the timeline that doesn’t hold up in Arrival. I caught the foreshadowing from the opening scenes, but everything is so disjointedly out of sequence, without any explanation, that it just feels muddled. It doesn’t have to be that way. Heinlein’s All You Zombies is intricate and out of sequence, but the narrative exposition of that convoluted time knot is crystal clear. (Yeah, that’s a diss from the past. Deal with it, Arrival.)
Ironically, this thread is full of apologies for Arrival’s most incoherent feature based on the fact that the movie is based on a book. I agree. If the original book was the source of the muddled plot (I won’t say it’s full of plot holes because I honestly can’t tell—it’s handwaving them away by refusing to clarify) then the movie should have improved upon that while adapting the material, especially when it’s so easy to show that in a visual medium. (Yeah, that’s a diss from other timelines. Deal with it, Witcher.)
The Prestige drops hints in the opening shots and explains the mechanic that will make the ending work halfway through the movie.
Arrival drops hints in the opening shots and explains the mechanic that will make the ending work halfway through the movie.
Am I missing something?
Somewhere in Arrival’s unexplained background timelines lies a very interesting story about a woman experiencing her life entirely out of sequence, possibly retaining much of it at a time, possibly losing pieces of it along the way. And here’s the kicker: Jonathan Nolan’s first season of Westworld showed that theme with narrative clarity. (Yeah, that’s a diss from all over the disjointed timelines. Deal with it, Arrival.)
Mind you, I still have a largely favorable view of Arrival, just not its muddled background timelines.
Hmm … not sure I agree that anything was muddled. In the context of the movie, the memories seemed like memories and felt like something that would tie into the story and themes at some point (and they did). It’s interesting to go back and consider how much of our own assumptions we then graft onto Adams’ performance. Like, even the opening scene of walking around the college campus I was seeing her in a state of grieving, when there’s actually nothing in her mannerisms to indicate anything other than someone going about their day.
But I’m dumb and was surprised by the reveal, and found it both heartbreaking and uplifting, so perhaps it’s less satisfying if you see it coming.
Me, too. Also, it is so much better a movie than Interstellar that I can’t even.
I like some Nolan. I like Memento and Inception and Dunkirk. I recall finding Prestige tedious, and Tenet not worth the effort of sticking with it.
I agree there’s nothing muddled in the context of the movie, and that it works beautifully in its ambiguity and uses the Kuleshov effect beautifully.
I figured out the reveal yet I loved it nonetheless.
I attribute this to the reveal being too early in the movie. So the audience knew what was going on, but many of the characters didn’t. And then they had that weird scene at the end of the movie, doing the reveal again, as if it was the first time. I remember scratching my head at that one. Why was revealing the machine and how it works a second time after doing it repeatedly in the course of the movie a good way to end the movie? It made me think maybe in an earlier draft of the script that last scene was supposed to be the big reveal at the end, but it got left in there after they completely changed the rest?
1 billion percent
OH! OH! I HAVE A HOT TAKE TOO!
The Prestige is Nolan’s best movie. And Arrival is twice the film it is.
Order up, table 2!