Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – Pretty Visuals and Floopy-haired Heroes

Article first published as Movie Review: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Pretty Visuals and Floppy-haired Heroes on Blogcritics.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) is one of those interesting contradictions – a movie based on a video game. Okay, so confession time. I’ve played Prince of Persia on Xbox and enjoyed it. That in and of itself does not mean that you will automatically enjoy the movie, as we all well know based on previous experience.
The scale and perspective of this is huge. There is no denying that it is plenty pretty enough. There are elements in the camera work and the parkour side of the fight sequences that is taken straight out of the game and it looks really, really good. It has flow and a certain logic intrinsic to the world it creates and that is all good and fine.
The basic narrative in most games is not all that complicated. It’s a pretty straight forward “kill the evil things and save the princess” kind of deal. The movie tries to expand and embellish on this by adding age old Cain and Abel myths, giving the pretty princess a haughty and resourceful personality and adding another layer of basic myths like the orphan boy found in the street showing the qualities of a true prince amongst men, the three brothers ruling together in counsel and competing in some ways for the throne and on and on. There is also humorous sidekicks and spectacular fight sequences.
The story takes part in a mythical past, in a far off Persian Empire where the sun always shines. It starts with an attack on the sacred city of Alamut where princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) rules. Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) leads the attack. He gives his father a robe which turns out to have been poisoned. Dastan is suspected of murder and has to run for his life. And jump. And leap. And throw himself off tall buildings. You get the idea.
Adventures ensue. The why and how and wherefore does not really matter, but there are evil assassins, plotting princes, ostrich races and a magical dagger that can turn back time. It’s all about the dagger, actually, as we come to discover as the story progresses. That part is no surprise if you’ve played the game, but it’s visually stunning.
The actors involved give it an arm and a leg trying to sell this as a mythical “once upon a time” with some added mystical sides to it. Ben Kingsley is suitably Machiavellian (or maybe we should go to the Borgias for reference instead) and Jake Gyllenhaal is in spectacular shape, whereas Richard Coyle is surprisingly sympathetic as Tus, the prince regent who tries to listen to counsel. If someone could explain the accents to me, though, I would be grateful.
There is treachery and deceit, Hassansins with snakes and daggers, much fighting and running in the streets. Add to that princesses in skimpy outfits and bare-breasted heroes with floppy hair and you have the basic premise of the whole narrative arc.
After two hours of this you are left with a suitably moral lesson about brotherhood and trust and the impression that visual aspects have taken president over story. It is very visually appealing, but it is not going to go down in history as leaving you with all that much to ponder once it’s over. Also, this is a Disney movie, which means there is literally no smooching. There is also a traditional comedy ending with the promise of a wedding between the hero Dustan and the pure princess, Tamina.
All in all it is entertaining and pretty, but that is all it is.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Mule

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) directed by Mike Newell stars Jake Gyllenhaal (Dastan), Gemma Arterton (Tamina), Ben Kingsley (Nizam), Alfred Molina (Sheik Amar), Toby Kebbell (Garsiv), Richard Coyle (Tus), Ronald Pickup (King Sharaman) and Steve Toussaint (Seso).

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

Day Watch – chalk it up to choice

Article first published as Movie Review: Day Watch – Chalk It Up to Choice on Blogcritics.

There is a fight going on between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Others, as they call themselves, are immersed in this battle and it takes place in modern-day Moscow in and around everyday life. There are vampires and witches and all manner of shape shifters and seers amongst the Others. The tenuous balance between light and dark is policed by a higher authority reminiscent of the inquisition, making sure that they don’t randomly gun each other down. The Great Truce is broken if one side deliberately kills one from the other side.

Our hero Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy), a seer, is teamed up with the novice Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) to patrol the streets and when we come into the action the two of them are chasing after a Dark One who has just stuck a needle in an old woman and is literally sucking the life out of her as if she was a juice box. They give chase and follow the Dark One into the Gloom, an alternate dimension where time and space are subtly different, but obviously parallel to our own reality. It turns out that Sveta is more powerful than Anton, and subsequently able to reach deeper into the Gloom and chase the Dark One further. She manages to tear off the mask the Dark One is wearing, revealing Anton’s son Yegor (Dmitriy Martynov).

All this ties in with a piece of chalk, the Chalk of Fate, used by Tamerlane to change destiny. The McGuffin of the movie is which side will come into possession of the chalk, the Dark or the Light. But, because this is that kind of story, even the light is … well, let’s just say there’s a healthy dose of grey in the mix. Anton means well, but he has to get his hands dirty to get to where he needs to be. He drinks too much and smokes too much and occasionally makes decisions that are not necessarily in his own best interest.

There’s a definite sense that both sides, Light and Dark, are necessary, that eradicating the Dark is not an option. The mayor moral difference between the two sides seems to be how they view power. The Light sees it as something to be handled carefully and responsibly and the Dark side sees power as mainly just that – power. Power for it’s own sake, used selfishly to gain you whatever you wish for, is a dangerous thing. It is a case of every tool being a weapon if you hold it right.

Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitskiy) is the leader of the Darks and his wife Alisa (Zhanna Friske) is the leading dark witch. They have seduced over Anton’s son Yegor to their side and the big showdown between the two sides is to take place during Yegor’s fourteenth birthday party. On the side of light we have the leader Geser (Vladimir Menshov ), Anton, Sveta, Olga (Galina Tyunina) and sundry other shapeshifters and witches.

They are all aware of each other, know each other and sometimes even live next door to each other, like Anton and Kostya, the vampire (Aleksey Chadov). They sometimes even help each other, but that doesn’t mean they are friends, exactly.

The entire cast is back from Night Watch, which makes this all the more enjoyable. It means you recognize the main players and you have a report with them, the viewer can see where we are now, a few years down the road. Anton is still the main focal point, caught in the middle of a struggle and the victim of circumstance in a way that makes all the difference. It turns out that this movie also hinges on choice, but in a slightly different way. It is about undoing wrongs in the past, paying attention to the details of the things you wish for. That’s where the Chalk of Destiny comes into play.

The first movie was enough of a success that the director obviously got handed a big bag of money for the sequel. To my endless delight he didn’t make the mistake of losing sight of what the world he created is supposed to be. The car chases look better, the fantastical aspects of the action get more room to come out and play, but the visceral quality of the violence and the organic nature of the effects remain, as well as the main focus of the action still being about the characters.

I’ll give an example of how slick this can be. Anton’s co-worker at the light company, where the Night Watch have their headquarters, asks him if he’s had a rough night. Anton mumbles a yes and asks why he wants to know. His co-worker tells him “your eyes are red” and for a flicker of a second a red shimmer appears in Anton’s eyes. It’s a here-and-gone thing, an aside, but it’s little things like that that make me like this so much. It also reminds the viewer that Anton has drunk blood when hunting vampires and that there is more to him than meets the eye.

There is also a body switch involving Anton and Olga (Galina Tyunina) that gives rise to some really funny scenes and that is mostly just done by the actors giving good performances. You never doubt that you are looking at Anton in Olga’s body, and that’s not something that needs any special effects at all. It’s all in the body language.

Many sundry other little character quirks and oddities essentially enrich the story as a whole. The end is fittingly apocalyptic in a sense, once the balance has been disrupted between the Light and the Dark. The One Dark Other, Yegor, that turns out to be more powerful than all the others has not gotten a handle on his powers yet and in a stand-off with Sveta he lays waste to most of Moscow. It turns out that Anton is the only one who can set it right.

I like everything about this movie, its length, its look and feel and pacing and the different sensibility to it, its very Otherness. I like the fact that it takes place in Moscow and that there are layers of cultural heritage built in to the very backdrop along with shameless product placement and a little in-house joke on the expense of the movie 9th Company (2005). It’s smart and modern and timeless at the same time, and that’s a difficult trick to pull off.

Day Watch (2006) directed by Timur Bekmambetov stars Konstantine Khabenskiy (Anton), Mariya Poroshina (Svetlana), Vladimir Menshov (Geser), Galina Tyunina (Olga), Viktor Verzhbitskiy (Zavulon), Zhanna Friske (Alisa), Dmitriy Martynov (Yegor), Valeriy Zolotukhin (Kostya’s father), Aleksey Chadov (Kostya), Nurzhuman Ikhtymbayev (Zoar), Aleksandr Samolenko (Bear/Medved), Yuriy Kutsenko (Ignat), Irina Yakovleva (Galina Rogova) and Georgiy Dronov (Tolik).

Night Watch – Urban Russian Fantasy

Article first published as Movie Review: Night Watch – A Russian Urban Fantasy on Blogcritics.

This city fantasy starts with a legend. There was a virgin in ancient Byzantium who became cursed. Wherever she went, bad things were sure to follow. The curse opened a vortex of damnation around her and the first forces of darkness were born into the world. Forces of light rose to fight them. Geser ( Vladimir Menshov) is the boss of the forces of light and Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitski) is the General of the dark forces.

The battle that raged was bloody and violent and the forces were so equally matched that a truce had to be negotiated unless everyone was to perish. The truce basically says no one gets to pick a fight and each person has to choose for themselves if they go to the light or dark side. And that is what it all comes down to, really, choice.

The protagonist Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy) goes to a woman who he believes to be a witch of sorts in order to get his philandering wife back. She tells him that his wife is with another man, carrying this other man’s child and offers to make the child go away and the wife come back, if Anton is willing to take the sin on his own conscience. Anton doesn’t really seem to understand how serious this is, so he says yes. The problem is that the woman, Darya (Rimma Markova) is the real deal. She is an Other, a Dark Other, even, and she actually can make all this come to pass.

At the exact moment the curse is about to take effect the Night Watch show up, travelling in the Gloom, the other dimension, where they are supposed to be invisible to regular humans. The problem is that Anton can see them. They restrain the witch and once they realize that Anton can see them they take him in.

Next time we meet Anton he is drinking blood and hunting vampires who have broken their particular set of laws. Vampires need licenses to be allowed to bite humans and Anton, who is a seer, is hunting one that has gotten in over his head.

The victim being stalked by this particular vampire is a young boy called Yegor (Dmitriy Martynov). Anton follows the boy and they wind up in the Metro where Anton catches sight of a woman who sets off one of his visions, premonitions, whatever you might like to call them. The woman is Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) who will come to play a mayor role later in this tale. Anton manages to help Yegor escape and the male vampire gets killed by the Night Watch, and somewhere in all this mess the problems now begin to converge.

Anton has killed one of the Dark Others, breaking the peace. The young boy Yegor, could see more than he should have been able to, thus making him an Other. Svetlana is definitely also something more than meets the eye. The forces of light and dark are doing battle, but for the moment it is subtle, a chess game, a series of events that may, or may not, have been engineered, in part, by Geser and Zavulon.

I am not going to give away the entire action here, that would spoil the fun, but it’s safe to say that it is pretty complicated and intricate and there is a reason for everything, from the first confusing scene in Darya’s kitchen, to the very last battle in the Gloom on a rooftop where Zavulon makes a sword out of his backbone. Yes, you read that right.

At the same time this movie is stylish and brutal, the violence is visceral and colourful and not the least bit shy, and there is no doubt that once you get killed here, you die. Horribly, and sometimes, in bits. We are in modern-day Moscow for most of the action and there are things that make me snigger, like the blatant product placement and the dry, Russian humour.

The effects are really organic and once you accept the basic premise that there is more to this reality than the mundane you don’t really have to work at suspending your disbelief. Some things are done old school, like the car chases where the Others drive about eight times as fast as is humanly possible and that may be the only time that I winced a little, since it’s done by speeding up the camera. On the other hand, Olga-the-Owls (Galina Tyunina) transformation from beast to woman is done old school too, but that works really, really well and is sufficiently physical and a big disgusting for it to feel real.

Underscoring all this fantasy and Otherness there is actually a good storyline that focuses on the characters and their very human choices and desires. Anton is trying to make up for past transgressions and Svetlana is trying to make sense of her life, which isn’t easy, considering that she does not really know what she is. Yegor is also more than meets the eye, and he does not know what he really is either. It makes their everyday lives complicated when their actions have a bigger impact than they themselves can predict.

All in all this is a really cool and smart urban fantasy, and that’s not a genre that I delve into with any real enthusiasm all that often, with the possible exception of Blade Runner. It is also really nice to see something like this come out of Russia, giving the viewer a different set of legends and myths and a different skyline as a backdrop.

Night Watch (2004) directed by Timur Bekmambetov stars Konstantin Khabenskiy (Anton), Vladimir Menshov (Geser), Valeriy Zolotukhin (Kostya’s father), Mariya Poroshina (Svetlana), Galina Tyunina (Olga), Yuriy Kutsenko (Ignat), Aleksey Chadov (Kostya), Zhanna Friske (Alice), Viktor Verzhbitskiy (Zavulon), Rimma Markova (Darya, the witch), Aleksey Maklakov (Simeon) Aleksandr Samoylenko (Ilya/Bear), Dmitriy Martynov (Yegor).

Mule

The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?

The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.

Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.

When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.

But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.

There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).

Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.

Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).

If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.

Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.

Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.

Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.

Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.

I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.

In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”

And there it is.

There was more to him, though.

Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;

-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.

That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.

Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.

Mule

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (2008) and starring Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien.
Okay. So. I have issues with the whole comic-turned-movie thing. I willingly admit it. It’s not just the fact that these movies have a tendency to get really silly… As you pretty much can expect from the idea of grown men putting their underwear on outside their stretchy tights. It’s more that they either do nothing with the characters or they don’t spend as dime on the script in order to blow their wad on the effects, or they don’t give a rat’s behind about the story in order to delve into the characterization of characters that have… uhm, very little depth.
So it’s surprisingly rare that you get a movie like this one that manages to do a good job of the visual as well as the story and use the characters in a clever way.
Hellboy is fantastic to say the least and it could have been blatantly cheesy and silly, but it somehow manages to tread that fine line and come out smelling like roses. Ron Perlman is all padded up, but he manages to carry the armour without becoming two dimensional and watching Hellboy and Abe get drunk on beer and sing Barry Manolow’s “Can’t smile without you” while musing on their respective love lives is just funny as all get out, seeing as how they manage to look about seventeen years old both of them.
The visuals are stunning. That’s really the only word for it. They’re right on the verge of heavy unreality the whole time, but somehow manage to seem credible as an alternate reality coexisting with ours. It’s less glossy than other similar alternative worlds I’ve seen, which is a bonus. There are a couple of things I personally could have done without, but I’m not going to gripe about that when the overall is so spectacular.
Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is a surprisingly soft-spoken bad guy despite his sword wielding and actually comes off as someone with an agenda that isn’t as far fetched or foaming at the mouth as some villains. It makes the plot better that he has cause to be doing what he’s doing. His twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) gets caught in an impossible situation and again, this actually gives depth to the storyline.
This is all good fun in the best possible way. The bad guys are really good and the good guys are bad ass. It’s visually imaginative and down right pretty at times. Hellboy is funny and sarcastic and still just a guy, despite the skin tone and the filed down horns. There’s no dead time and you don’t find yourself looking at your watch or yawning.
As long as you take that Coleridgean leap of faith and submit to the willing suspension of disbelief you’ll have a good time.
You can’t really ask for more than that.

Mule

The Prestige – Illusions are everything

The Prestige (2006) is directed by Christopher Nolan and stars Hugh Jackman, Christopher Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine and also has a wonderfully obscure David Bowie in the role of Tesla.

The two young magicians Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Bale) start out as friends and colleagues working the magic circle of late nineteen century London under the watchful eye of the experienced Cutter (Caine). One night an illusion goes horribly wrong and Angier’s wife dies on stage. Angier and Borden become bitter enemies and rivals stopping at almost nothing to sabotage each other’s acts and lives.

The setting is frankly sumptuous. It’s a dream London where even the nasty bits look gorgeous. This could have been a price of baroque gothic if it hadn’t been for the stellar performances of the main cast. One of the best tricks to get away with a movie like this is to get actors who will commit to their roles. Angier and Borden are set up as opposites in almost every respect, including social backgrounds, but they share one overriding passion – magic. Or, perhaps more correctly, illusions.

The basic premise for watching a magician is what the poet Coleridge termed “the willing suspension of disbelief”. We all know there is no such thing as magic. Still, the illusionists job is to sow the tiniest little doubt and make us go Oooooh. This might take hours and hours of practice and any number of tricks and trapdoors and slight of hand. For me the biggest parallel is of course self-referential. Illusions and movies are the same thing. Keep that in mind when the veteran actor Caine talks of magic and it will all make beautiful sense – all the way to the end.

The McGuffin of the plot is the magic trick Borden uses in his act that Angier tries to replicate. Angier goes so far as to hire the scientist Tesla played by Bowie. And here you really have to let the suspension of disbelief get to work, but frankly I don’t mind. Especially not when Bowie as Tesla delivers the brilliant line “Exact science, Mr Angier, is not an exact science.” What Angier forgets is how deeply obsessed illusionists get – and Borden is no exception to that rule.

It’s difficult to speak of the actual plot of the movie without giving away the ending. And the beginning. And, actually, some of the middle bits… Suffice to say you can watch it twice and enjoy it twice. And it’s beautiful and masterly. Movies and illusions. Same thing. This one definitely makes you go Oooooh.

Mule