The Prestige.

My roommate and I just spent far too long attempting to unlock the cypher that is the film The Prestige. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of experiencing this film, the plot is as follows:

Sometime in the late 1800s, two magicians begin their careers together as plants in a magic show. Things run amok when Borden (Christian Bale, that hottie Welsh actor) ties a knot binding Angier's wife. She dies onstage -- possibly as the result of Borden's ill-adivsed knot-tying acumen -- in an underwater escape trick. Angier (Hugh Jackman, that hottie Aussie actor) is furious. The two magicians engage in an ever escalating battle to destroy each other's acts. Borden eventually puts together a trick to end all tricks, The Transported Man, where he walks through a door on stage and then reappears through another door seconds later on the other side of the stage. Angiers is obsessed with how Borden performs this trick. And so he finds Nikolas Tesla, and asks Tesla to build a machine for him that will transport him.

Alas, Tesla builds a machine that does not transport, but duplicates. However, in watching the movie, I was not sure what it was the machine did. There was a scene in Tesla's workshop where he kept attempting to transport Angier's hat. About a hundred feet from the workshop, dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of hats are found. At that point, I probably should have realized that the machine produced duplicate items. However, I refused to suspend my disbelief. I was convinced that there was some plausible explanation. But I digress...

Angier brings the machine from Colorado Springs (where Tesla's workshop has been burned down by Thomas Edison's goons) to London. He uses it to perform his act. Angier enters the machine and a duplicate is created up on the mezzanine level. A trap door on the stage opens and dumps the original (original?) Angier into a tank of water, where he drowns. Thus, one Angier is killed every time he does his trick. Moreover, each tank is brought to Angier's basement, where hides each dead body; this is all exposed at the end of the film.

Also at the end of the film, we learn that Borden has been able to perform the Transporting Man trick because he has a twin brother. The two brothers have been sharing one life the entire time. To me, this plot twist was at least plausible. I was able to swallow it. It made sense to me, unlike the duplicating machine.

This story is one of the most ridiculous I have seen in a long while. I had to watch it twice. The first time I saw it, I was looking for a way that Angier's trick could have been performed absent a body double. I searched and searched, looking for any way to explain the phenomenon, short of a people duplicating machine. Because honestly, the duplicator would have been the easy answer, as it is so fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, as to defy reality. Thus, when I finally figured out that the entire story was based on this duplicator, I felt cheated. It felt like a cop out... like the movie that ends when the protagonist wakes up and the audience learns that the entire thing was a dream.

Regardless, the movie does elicit some ethical and perhaps metaphysical questions. Near the end of the movie, Angier laments that he entered the machine each night, never knowing whether he would be the dead man in the box, or the Prestige -- the guy who appears on the mezzanine. He kills one of himself each time he performs the trick. Is he suicidal? Is he a murderer? Which is the original? The man who appears on the balcony, or the man who falls into the pool beneath the stage?

Perhaps the more important question is: Who cares? Who cares which the original is? The plot and the concept is so far fetched, that the ethical questions become lost on me. I want a movie that makes sense, and an answer that doesn't require science fiction.

When I first began typing this, I had enjoyed my movie rental experience. I was a tad baffled, but had been entertained for the requisite two hours. However, now that I've actually written out the plot, I am just pissed.