Frank, I spotted another resemblance in the movie. If they do end up doing a Star Trek: The Early Years movie, Andy Serkis is beginning to look eerily like DeForest Kelly. I did a double take before realizing who he really was.

The real revelation, to me, was the final understanding that Angier was a worthless turd of a man, even aside from his crazy revenge plot, and deserved anything and everything Alfred -- or fate, or Wayne Brady -- could think of to do to him.

I was pretty much assuming that from the moment that he said that maiming Alred's hand and nearly destroying his livelihood wasn't enough, given that Julia's death wasn't a malicious or intentional one even if Alfred had been lying about remembering which knot he tied. It was clear from that moment on that he wouldn't be satisfied if Alfred were able to build any kind of life for himself .

So, speaking of the knot, are we to assume that the reason Alfred couldn't answer the question was because Angier was asking the twin who wasn't on stage that night?

The whole thing is interesting, because Angier and the audience can never really be sure which twin did what. We know that the one who died is the one who loved Olivia, but other than that, I don't think it's clear which was which. Angier really only had a vendetta against one twin, in a way -- was it the same twin who pursued the rivalry, or were they both as committed? It didn't sound like it, at the end.

It may be a question answered by the book, I don't know.

Oh, wow, Dana, I never thought of that aspect.

Damn.

Damn, all this Prestige talk is frustrating! I wanted to see that this weekend, but my dad wanted to see The Departed. While I enjoyed the movie muchly, I'm dying to see the one everyone is talking. about. right. now!

And unfortunately, it's the kind of movie you have to talk about almost exclusively in whitefont.

I haven't seen The Departed, but people keep saying it's really good.

It was good. Despite knowing who is the mole in each organization, it was the suspense in watching them trying to flush each other out that was great. It kept me on the edge of my seat and there were enough HSQ moments that I actually jumped a couple of times. Even Jaws didn't do that to me.

I thought The Departed kind of fell apart in the last half hour or so, but I always enjoy watching Matt Damon. DiCaprio, I just can't connect to, for some reason, and I could have done with 800% less Nicholson.

Frank, I spotted another resemblance in the movie. If they do end up doing a Star Trek: The Early Years movie, Andy Serkis is beginning to look eerily like DeForest Kelly.

Heh, I might need to see it again to confirm that. The guy who made the Tom Skerritt comparison immediately spotted Andy Serkis as Andy Serkis, which I thought was funny.

From the book:

Essentially, the Angiers are just copies of copies of copies. They (he) retain no memory of dying, because the dead one isn't copied. There was always a plan at the end of the show to dispose of the prestige, and usually it was done really soon after the completion of the show. The copy would be in the machine, in the box, for immediate disposal. The "original" Angier, the one outside of the box, would be the one in charge. From the perspective of the book, he never considered the prestige--the copy--to truly be him. It was just that, the prestige, the copy, and he could handwave it away as such.

The only complication came when--and I'm not sure this was in the movie as I haven't seen it yet--Borden cuts the power to the machine in the middle of the copy-making, and the original Angier is left as only part of himself, while the prestige is an even thinner part of himself. they are truly together one person, and not copies as in previous uses of the machine. It's the first chance that a prestige-copy was ever able to live long enough to consider its situation. And since he was also Angier, as much as the original was Angier, he was surprisingly circumspect about the many dead copies of himself hidden in his cellar. Very chilling.

And then, regarding Borden: probably the more interesting thing, from the book, for me, was how the twins were very much a single person as well. While it is never stated explicitly, the Borden narrative repeatedly mentions a "Pact" created between the two, where the two ends up reading more like a psychotic break resulting in two personalities in one body more than anything else. It's why it took a lot of convincing to me that Borden *was* twins--and I use the singular verb purposefully--because it felt more like a Jekyll/Hyde situation. I have no idea how they conveyed all the information about their collective life together, but from the narrative structure of the book, they quite literally experienced everything as one person, one identity, one single personality.

Honestly, I think the message of the whole this was that both men were horrible, in different ways; and they might not have been so, if their ridiculous competition and sabotage of each other hadn't affected their lives as drastically as it did. I suspect they are more sypathetic in the book, but that is only because you are reading the story fron their perspectives.

Interesting, SA -- in the movie, the cutting-the-power thing never happens. The only time Borden is backstage is when he finds Drowned!Angier in the tank, tries to break the glass, and ends up in prison for Angier's murder.

(Which was the only bit that really had me puzzled, how he knew not to appear on the balcony that night. I figured that part of Michael Caine's front-of-house duties must have been "Tell me when Borden is in the audience," so he'd know which night to disappear.)