The Prestige – What you see is not what you saw.

One critic said that this is a movie you’ll want to see repeatedly. I happen to agree, there is so much you can miss after the first pass of the hand. I am sure you can watch this a dozen times and still miss something. This is a film project designed to deceive the eye. In the Brothers Bloom I witnessed the same quality. The magician, the con artist, and even the actor – all are professions designed to misdirect your eyes to looking away from the trick. The perfect trick leaves the audience in wonder, wanting to believe it is real. The perfect con ends with everyone getting what they wanted. The perfect acting job blends the actor into the character’s persona. Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn, Mandy Patikin as Inigo Montoya, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.
The Prestige utilizes jump-cuts to display key moments without the benefit of context. It opens with Robert Ansier drowning in a water tank while Alfred Borden watches. Now Borden is on trial for killing Ansier. Something happened that caused these two renowned magicians to be at each other's throats. Both has gotten their start while working together under a old has-been magician. When they broke out as solo acts, they became natural rivals, each determined to be the best magician in England. This pursuit leads to a dangerous game of sabotage and one-up-manship. Borden is the genius illusionist, creating tricks that mystify magicians. Borden is the crowd pleasing showman, amazing audiences with his building presentation of the tricks. Each magician utilizes disguises to observe the rival’s shows, systematically tearing holes in the other's best tricks. The title of best magician escalates from a grudging rivalry to a burning obsession to learn and reveal the other’s secrets. The name of Tesla, a reclusive scientific genius living in Colorado Springs, is the key to the secret of the mysterious Transported Man. A trick in which the performer "teleports" fifteen feet through a door in the air. By the end of the movie, many of the secrets appear to have unravelled, revealing many simple and ugly truths. However, as the movie ends, those truths are thrown in doubt once more, raising more questions than answers.

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"." - Cutter