Actually, I like the fact that The Illusionist had the bad guys “winning” by framing a man of a murder he didn’t commit, with the film justifying his being framed merely because the prince was acting like, well, a typical 19th-century prince. It’s not often you see such amorality embraced in an American production.
“Ohhh, he doesn’t like democracy! Let’s kill him!” 
I’ve seen them both.
They will forever be compared to each other because of the release dates, titles, and abstract subject matter, but their plots and themes are so different it’s nearly impossible to judge one over the other.
Except for one important point: they’re both about magic. Specifically, they both ask the question: “How far can one go for a magic trick?”
The Prestige is all about the magicians and the magic trick itself, while The Illusionist is about what a magician can do with magic beyond the stage.
Fuck that shit. Norton’s tricks had three-dimensional voice-throwing holograms mingling with people in a tightly-packed stadium. This is why the ending sucks so much rectum.
Yes, but it gives much, much more information about both men and both families (of course). It jumps back and forth from descendants meeting in present day to the notebooks and diaries of both magicians. I highly recommend the book. I was a little apprehensive about reading it, since I’d know what was coming while they were slyly revealing it, but you toss that off pretty quickly and get sucked into their world. The Victorian tone is spot-on, and the magic history is well represented.
Let me put it in internet terms. . .
Teh Illusionist was teh r0XX0r5!
Teh Prestige was teh suXX0r5!
Actually, I thought the Illusionist was all right, but definitely a bit corny. Not great, but if I rented it for a Friday night at home, I wouldn’t be dissapointed. If you’re looking for an Ed Norton fix, check out “Down in the Valley.”
Yeah - I would have liked it if they had been able to scam the prince without relying upon “impossible” magic.
One question about the Prestige which lessened the impact of the final scene for me:
Why did HJ keep all of the old tanks with floating duplicates of himself, instead of simply disposing of the bodies someway or another (burial, burning, selling to anatomists) and re-using the tank?
[spoiler]Part of it would be how many bodies could he dispose of before someone started getting suspicious. You can only sell so many bodies to the anatomists, burning would attract attention (I don’t think cremation was common at the time, so he’d have to find somewhere to go to burn them without drawing questions), burial you’d need to have gravediggers and there would be only so many places to bury bodies and they might just talk about the strange man having a body buried that looks just like him (if they happen to catch a glimpse of it).
He’d have 100 bodies to dispose of in a short period of time, without drawing undue attention to himself (HE doesn’t want to go to prison after all).
So it makes the best sense. An abandoned mine, stick the bodies there. When you’re done the run of the trick, blast closed the mine.
That’s just the practical considerations of course. There was probably something with wanting to keep those duplicates of himself because he is aware on some level that they all are himself but I don’t pretend to be a psychologist.[/spoiler]
Down in the Valley? Talk about teh suXX0r5. Horrible movie. *The Illusionist * wasn’t really very good either. I hope *The Painted Veil * is decent, to redeem the usually excellent Mr. Norton in my mind.
Hugh Jackman, on the other hand, is becoming a favorite. Between *The Prestige * and *The Fountain * (not to mention Wolverine), I’m a fan.
I also thought that The Prestige was by far the better movie. The Illusionist was frankly a fairy tale of the peasant besting the prince, which is a fine story unless it insults our intelligence all the way through.
I’m not a magician but I’ve read a great deal of magic history. From what I can tell the sleight of hand tricks were real but the major illusions were fakes. To call them variants of actual magic tricks is to call the space station a variant on a kite.
Take the orange tree. We know what the original is like, because we have Robert-Houdin’s own writing on it:
http://www.illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=197&type=articles
In other words, it did not grow from a seed to full tree and then produce fruits in full view of the audience. The butterflies were automatons which rose into the air and didn’t fly into the audience. Steinmeyer’s description in Hiding the Elephant is taken almost word for word from Robert-Houdin’s book. The trick as presented in the movie was a CGI illusion, not remotely presentable in the 19th century.
Even more so, the later tricks with people were impossible then and are impossible today for a live audience. No amount of citing the very real and impressive effects of earlier magicians can change that. Every illusion in the movie would require real magic rather than stage magic to create. That’s why the ending, even if it is supposed to be in Giametti’s mind, is such a cheat. It’s as if the director didn’t watch his own movie but expected us not to care.
While I don’t know much about the history of magic, I wonder if faulting The Illusionist for this yet giving The Prestige a free pass for this is really fair.
Some of the tricks in The Prestige were also clearly done using CGI effects (and I’m not just talking about the big one; the early “Transporting Man” tricks were surely done this way), and like The Illusionist the rational explanations given for these tricks could be criticized. There’s also the point that none of Ed Norton’s “confessions”–to Jessica Biel early on, to the crowd gathered outside the police station, even in the “Orange Tree” notebook–do not preclude his ability to perform real magic, and for me the question is still somewhat up in the air (exactly as it should be in a fairy tale).
I think viewers who have adopted an “ultra-realist” interpretation of film would be frustrated by several components of Norton’s film; The hinting at a larger theme, the distilled motivations of secondary characters, the ambiguities left in the wake of dramatic goals. The problem for them then is with the form itself: Magic potions don’t have to be explained in fairy tales, but post-modern storytelling demands a certain level of rationalization for every event that occurs; the former is going for emotional impact, the latter for intellectual satisfaction. The approaches are simply different–one is not “better” than the other–but it does mean that criticizing one using the qualities of the other is like criticizing a horror movie for not having enough catchy tunes.
On balance, I think The Illusionist performed better within its archetype than The Prestige did within its. The Prestige was by no means a failure, and I’m not saying a moviegoer has to like all genres of film. But criticizing The Illusionist–a fairy tale love story about a magician–because it contains a certain level of magic–by definition something which cannot be explained via natural laws–is somewhat limiting 
The Prestige asked us to believe that Nikola Tesla invented a machine that could violate one of the most fundamental laws of physics, and I had no problem with it.
The Illusionist askes us to believe that Edward Norton and Jessica Biel were so passionately in love that they would risk everything, from their lives to their nation, to be together, and I didn’t buy it for a minute.
I love Edward Norton. He’s one of the foremost actors of the day, but his role in The Illusionist was so underwritten that there’s practically no character there at all. He does a fantastic job with almost nothing to work with, but it’s not quite enough to save the film. I’m not familiar with Jessica Biel outside of this film. She may be a fine actor. But her role is similarly thin in this film, and unlike Norton, she doesn’t have the skill to rise above it. Her character, who is supposed to inspire such great passion in the other characters in the film, is utterly forgettable. I’d have much rather watched a film about Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell’s characters, both of whom seemed much more vital and interesting than the rather limp lead roles. This might have had the added advantage of saving Sewell’s character from his rather absurd end, which felt like an entirely inauthentic attempt to justify the protagonists monstrous plot against him.
The Prestige featured protagonists with similarly monstrous plots against each other, but the saving grace of that film was that it never tried to justify their actions. Like WordMan said, it’s a Greek tragedy, with both character propelled towards self-destruction by their towering egos and bone-deep hatred of each other. Unlike the leads of The Illusionist, Bale and Jackman’s characters genuinely change throughout the movie. Jackman begins as the more sympathetic character, but his desire for revenge twists his character until he’s an unimaginably evil abomination, while Bale, who originally would do anything for a trick, comes to recognize that the price he has paid for his fame and fortune was too high, becoming humanized in the process.
The irony of the two films is that, while The Prestige’s climax revolves around the use of genuine magic, it presents the non-magic stage tricks in a more honest manner than The Illusionist. There is no great reveal in The Illusionist where the audience thinks, “Ah, that’s how he did it!” We are presented with a trick that seems impossible, and then we are told that it’s just a trick, but there’s no reveal, no part where the ingenuity of the character is made explicit to us. How does Norton summon the ghosts? We must assume that he is very, very clever. The Prestige actually shows us how clever the characters are. Bale invents a seemingly impossible trick, but how he pulled it off is not only made explicit in the film, but is in fact central to the plot of the movie.
Most importantly, The Prestige has genuine depth. The characters have believable, often conflicted motivations that, while exploded to grostesque proportions by their respective manias, are firmly grounded in human experience, with the plot evolving out of their actions. By contrast, the characters in The Illusionist are visibly manipulated by the screenwriter to suite the plot. The Illusionist isn’t really about anything. It’s a rather simple caper film - a sort of Usual Suspects in frock coats, but without the inventiveness. The Prestige, on the other hand, holds in its core a fascinating philosophical question about the nature of self and the persistence of identity. By any measure, The Prestige is the far superior film.
I liked The Prestige- a good fantasy with some cool twists- but I thought ultimately it just required way too much dispension of disbelief.
Trying to say it without spoiler boxes- Tesla would never in his life have worried about funding again if he’d accomplished what he did in The Prestige. I can see him not ever making the device for another person again, but I can also see him using it to create enough wealth to fund his power experiments into perpetuity (and really piss off Edison in the process).
De gustibus non est disputandum, but in making this point I wonder if you overlook why Eisenheim is in the film. He is an archetype, a man always “on stage”; the fact that the entire story is told from Paul Giammati’s perspective makes it clear the story is slanted and fable-like (I was about to write “fabulous”, but that’s an entirely different thing ). Such a role is by nature “underwritten”. It calls for a great actor who, with glances and gestures, can fill in a lot of the hidden meaning. Norton’s later stage performances–the way he walks to his chair under gas-lamp floodlights, the piercing eyes under a flaming mane of jet-black hair–are perfect examples of this.
Jessica Biel was less successful at this type of role. Fortunately she isn’t on screen as much, and her role is to essentially create a plausible motive as a love interest. A better actress might have helped, but her role is fairly minor once its evaluated clinically.
Again, dismissing The Illusionist as “a rather simple caper film” misses the point entirely. Why does Giammati’s narrative begin with a clearly incredible story about Eisenheim’s youth? Why does he early-on tell Norton that he is only “the son of a butcher”? Why is the aristocracy so obviously parodied in the party scenes? Why does Eisenheim use magic to give money to the poor? Why does Sewell in his final scenes talk about “a thousand voices and nothing will be done?” Answers to these questions hint at the larger themes/forms that come into play. I’m not saying The Illusionist is the best film ever made, but I think such ultra-realist criticism is misplaced.
The Prestige’s musings about the nature of self and persistence of identity are notable qualities, but I question whether the questions it raises are fascinating in-and-of themselves, or mere tools to explain the final scenes or create eye candy (let’s face it; the ONLY reason JG kept all those boxes was so the director would have a cool shot at the end). The two films aim at different things, and while The Illusionist hits its somewhat easy mark much more effectively, The Prestige is not a bad film even if it fails to completely satisfy.
I think when you say “The Prestige is the far superior film,” what you actually mean is you liked it better, and I have no problem with that. It would be foolish to insist that you reverse your opinion, but I’d also suggest that you may have missed quite a bit that made The Illusionist a good film.
For once I actually find myself disagreeing with you – at least, I’d say The Illusionist requires more. Admittedly the invention is undeniably out-there, but the Tesla legends include similarly awesome inventions. It was the one real ‘magic’ in the film.
Also, you do remember what happened just before the invention’s delivery, right? There’s no guarantee that he COULD make another, is what I mean.
I agree that it was completely unbelievable, but it was presented in such a way that – rather like a magic trick – the unbelievable becomes believable, at least believable enough for a little while.
It most certainly does not.
However, I agree that the two approaches are of equal value and equal weight. My argument is that after settling on one approach throughout the film, you cannot suddenly switch over to the other and pretend that it never happened. If the director had simply said: this is real magic, and their love is what allowed it, or his mystic stay in Nepal or whatever, blah, blah, blah, no issues would be raised. The audience wanted it to be real magic. Having Giametti provide a “solution” that was manifestly idiotic, impossible, and insultingly full of holes was totally the blame of the director, who was also the writer. The original Millhauser story, as I understand it, left the magic as magic.
Miller, good analysis of the weakness of the Illusionist script and the constrasting strength of The Prestige.
She’s her daughter, and her sister. And it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.
I haven’t seen The Prestige, but I was seriously disappointed by The Illusionist for the reasons previously detailed; the characters were thin, the performances weak (this is a great performance by Norton? He did better work in The Italian Job, and he made it clear he was just in that for contractual reasons) , and the end reveal was a total cheat; the fact that the filmmakers had to use CGI to make the illusions look even vaguely real made the premise seem unlikely. Someday someone may make a film about nonsupernatural illusions (I’m holding out for David Mamet, who seems like a natural for such a thing) but it wasn’t The Illusionist.
Stranger
I actually found the weakness of the character somewhat interesting. She was so unappealing, yet you could almost believe that she was this object of desire by self-deluded men. I suppose there must be a term for finding something appealing that depends on what may be an unintentional flaw (not to get off-topic, but The Conversation is good example). It made me enjoy this movie a little more to put that spin on it.
Which it gave the merest of treatments. Since it’s supposed to be kept ‘hidden’ throughout the film, it doesn’t really discuss the issue. Just raising the question may be something, but it’s not much.
As for the objections to the ‘unrealistic’ magic in The Illusionist - I liked it. It allowed the movie to show us magic we could believe in. By this I mean an illusion that is incredible and yet so amazing that we end up believing it’s real. I generally don’t like magic shows since I can’t usually be shaken out of disbelief in the performer. With the Illusionist I could at least have some sense of what it feels like for an audience that could believe. I don’t think it is meant to be what the audience actually saw; it’s what they thought they saw.
They are both flawed. In my opinion The Illusionist may actually be a bit better for its flaws, and The Prestige may not be quite as flawed, but neither of them rise to greatness; both are simply good.
I liked the Prestige way more better. But I liked the Illusionist, too. If you’re going to watch both, it’s always best to watch the worst one first.
The problem is, I didn’t find her to be unappealing. I didn’t find her to be much of anything. The film was unable to make me care about her one way or the other, because it neglected to supply her (or Norton’s character) with anything resembling a personality.
Not much? It’s everything! This is one of the absolute best treatments of a high concept I’ve seen in a mainstream movie. It presents us with a situation, and with characters who react in a certain way to that situation, but it requires the audience to tease out the larger implications of the character’s action with regard to that situation. I don’t want a discussion over it to occur in the movie. It’s supposed to be a story, not a lecture. What the film does, brilliantly, is give the audience enough information to have the discussion themselves, without taking either side itself. Very few movies are able to pull this off. Most fall into didactism, trying to convince the audience that a particular answer or viewpoint is correct. The Prestige does not take a position on the question it proposes. It does not interpret itself. It does not do the audience’s job for them. This is all too rare a quality in modern cinema; it should be treasured when an example is found.
Hmm. That’s a good point. I don’t quite recall the structure of the film. I remember that it uses Giamatti delivering a report to Sewell as a framing device, but I don’t remember precisely when the framing device was dropped. It was after Norton’s supposed death, right? If that’s the case, you’re correct: we’re not seeing what actually happened in the theater when Norton summoned the ghosts - we’re seeing Giamatti’s recollection (sometimes second or third hand) of what happened in the theater. But, I still have a problem with it, I think. I didn’t care for the framing device in general, and if there was an intent to raise the specter of an unreliable narrator, it was not sufficiently re-enforced.
Miller’s reasons for loving *The Prestige * and finding *The Illusionist * disappointing are spot-on. Well said, sir! The characters in *The Prestige * are deep and real, despite the magical/impossible elements of the story. I can suspend disbelief as long as the central premise of the movie, which is what ambition can do a person’s humanity in this case, rings true. I found the ending of *The Prestige * shocking not because the laws of physics were violated, but because of the revelation of how Jackman’s character was transformed into a monster. It was brilliantly executed, and could be read on a metaphorical level as well. Bale’s reveal was also fantastic because of the magnitude of his life-long sacrifice, a sacrifice that Jackman sought to duplicate at the price of his own undoing. It was a sublime reveal for me.
The Illusionist was just another cliched, lame love story, oh yeah, and with some magic thrown it. It didn’t bring anything new to the table. It didn’t surprise me or make me think. I spent a lot of time thinking about *The Prestige * after it was over and zero thinking about The Illusionist.