[ExI] SPOILERS for The Prestige Re: Favorite ~H+ Movies

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 26 12:48:43 UTC 2007


On 6/26/07, Randall Randall <randall at randallsquared.com> wrote:
> But then, all copies of him end up dead.
>
> While I differ with Clark (and you, I assume) about
> the identity of the copies, I think the point of the
> film was hubris, in the original Greek sense.  The
> fellow with Tesla's copier had this completely
> wonderful, amazing device, and chose to use it merely
> to humiliate his rival, thus showing the audience
> what a bad person he is, which is why people seem to
> mostly agree that he "got what was comin' to him" at
> the end when he was shot.  That movie was a tragedy,
> not uplifting in any sense, that I could see, and
> with its sole redeeming feature a techno-gadget that
> didn't really make up for the rest.

It was an amazing device, but not wonderful.  It would have been a
different movie though if Tesla's copier had the same copy-of-a-copy
defect as in Multiplicity where each clone got progressively more
glitchy and stupid.  :)  I don't really know what my position is on
the identity of the copies or their "rights"  I do get the hubris and
vanity point though, to the effect that in the end the guy has spent
his whole life with nothing to show for it (well, other than the
warehouse full of drowned clones)

> The twins loved different women, which is why each
> woman thought "he" was cheating.

true.  I meant the fact that the one who did not love the wife was
forced to be married by virtue of the shared life they were living.

I thought the scene where the kid cried over the bird in the cage "he
killed that bird's brother" was an interesting bit of foreshadowing.



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