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.)

DiCaprio, I just can't connect to, for some reason,

Him, I could connect to, it was Damon I couldn't. And Jack, well, he just plays himself over and over again. I think they like him in movies for the name. Which is sad. He used to act. Now, he's part of the deli counter.

Him, I could connect to, it was Damon I couldn't.

You're the yin to my yang!

Jess, that's a good point. Maybe he heard the yelling, like the rest of the audience did? But it does seem like he would need to have a plan in place.

Jessica:

oh, how strange. In the book, Borden sneaks backstage (a second time from the one you're describing) to try and find out the secret behind the tesla machine, and he sees all this energy being drawn and assumes it's going to burn the theatre down, so in a fit of panic he pulls the plug, literally, on the machine in the middle of the prestige-copy being created. The prison thing NEVER happened. They only orbited each other in vindictiveness, and never involved the police.

Now I really want my stupid ahem to finish because I need to know the differences between the book and the movie.

Dana! That's it!

I was sooo frustrated by the "I don't know" response and it made me really hate the Borden character. I knew there was a twin, but unlike SA's very helpful description of two bodies/one mind, I never thought of Fenton as the bad guy. More a hapless dupe. (no pun intended...then again...)

It makes so much sense that, at least in the movie version, the one NOT on the stage would not have known which knot what used. Then again, since they shared everything, including their women you'd think they'd have had a discussion about guilt, etc.

This movie is like an onion. Layers.
t /shrek

eta: SA, no kidding!? The prison aspect was a huge framing device. I can't imagine it NOT being a part of the story. Huh.

Okay, next question about the book v. movie structure: Did the men read each other's diaries? In the movie, the diary entries were 'cooked', so that, at the end, each got an 'up yours' message from the author. Angier basically tells Borden that he's stealing his daughter, etc.

Nope, no kidding. They must have made some interesting structural changes to the movie's script.

To begin with, there was nothing involving either men's children. They made a point to stay well out of the way of each other's personal lives, concentrating only on the public humilation of upstaging their rivals on the, well, stage. It was one of a handful of gentlemenly concessions. The exceptions are only a very difficult scene that was revealed far later in the book noting that Borden, when he had crashed the Angiers' seance, had caused a miscarriage for Angier's wife, which fueled the rivalry further; and then, when (Scarlett Johanssen's character) offered to be Angier's spy on Borden and then ended up leaving him for Borden (to be the mistress of Alfred), that served another way for Angier to hate Borden. Angier is a terribly despicable character--I would say even more so than Borden, by the end.

The framing device of the diary was used at the beginning as Alfred's memoirs, and there's a distinct, if subtle, POV change between the twin Bordens, when the other reads the initial memoirs as they are written. They make notations and queries and footnotes to the others' work. But it is clear that they only know about it. And the memoirs were written in earnest, not as a trick or misleading thing.

Now, I'm wondering--did the movie have anything about Borden and Angier's descendants? Because that is the beginning and ending of the novel, with their great-grandchildren, who are just as affected by the magicians' rivalry then and the evils of the tesla machine as their forbears were.