380. The Prestige

Christopher Nolan has announced that The Prestige will be re-released in theaters to mark its twentieth anniversary. The film came out in 2006. It is now 2026. The film is about two magicians who spend their entire adult lives destroying themselves and each other in order to perform one trick.

The film will be in theaters again. People will pay to see it. Some of these people have already seen it, which is the detail that makes this announcement interesting, because the film is about a man doing the same thing twice in a row and what that costs.

The Prestige is structured as a magic trick. A magic trick has three parts: the pledge, in which the thing is shown; the turn, in which the thing vanishes; and the prestige, in which the thing comes back. The film explains this in the first five minutes. It then spends two hours demonstrating it. The pledge is 2006. The turn is the twenty years in which you thought about the ending. The prestige is now.

The magicians in the film would like to know how Nolan did this. They spent their entire adult lives trying to understand how to make something come back and it destroyed them both. Nolan made a film about two men failing at this, and the film came back twenty years later without anyone getting hurt. The magicians would find this unfair.

You have probably seen this film. You are going to pay to see it again. This is not a criticism. It is a description of what the prestige is.