That was during the [censored] era so it doesn't count.

very very good movie, one of my favorites.

the illusionist SUCKS. Don't see how it's even a comparison.

i remember him saying they both did each act 50% of the time, how sometimes one was with scarlett, and how sometimes the other was with the wife, i remember him talking about sacrifices he made (and it cues to the cutting fingers portion), but I don't think I ever heard him profusely say it was his twin.

Edit: I guess that's how they were able to endure everything together. I mean sure as hell no random is going to cut his fingers just for being a good magician. I always wondered how Hugh Jackman and his dupe broke up, but how these guys were able to endure everything together.

Also, does anyone find it funny that out of all the people that volunteer during the magic shows, the two repeatedly pick each other when choosing volunteers.

I liked The Prestige a lot. wtf at preferring the illusionist.

ya its kinda fake but you have to assume that only got picked at 1 out of x amount of showings [they repeat the performance numerous times as stated "there will only be 100 showings"] Also they both know what kind of volunteer they are looking for so they have an advantage over a "random" volunteer.

Bale does a seriously, seriously good job of this. Watching the movie again you can pretty clearly discern that there are two personalities there.

I liked the movie a lot, and the first time I saw it the ending pissed me off to no end. Upon watching it again, I became pretty convinced that there must be some sort of internal logic to explain Angier's version of the trick instead of actually making multiple copies of himself; otherwise Cutter's little "you want to be fooled bit" doesn't really make much sense. But I never really came up with anything conclusive.

Hate to rehash an old thread, but I'll do it anyway.

Jackman was the inferior magician to the end. He "cheated" by essentially using actual magic (clones) to pull it off since he wasn't good enough to legitimately fool the audience. He took the easy way out compared to Bale.

i actually didn't like it that much. just a taste thing, i can tell it was a well made movie.

what's the cop out? that they introduce an invention that doesn't exist in real life?

When Jackman first sees him in the last scene, he says, "a brother? a twin?" Bale then explains everything. He never explicitly says, "we're twins." But it is certainly implied (by Bale not denying it).

great movie.
i was disappointed as well but i thought giamatti was excellent.
because you're looking for something that doesn't exist. they made it explicitly obvious that he was making copies of himself: the shot outside of tesla's compound, all the dead bodies in tanks, and i believe angier talks about how he never knows if he's going to be the one that walks out or the one that ends up in the tank.

This.

This movie is so ****ing good. How this didn't kill at the academy is beyond me.

I've seen the movie twice and it just now occurs to me from this guys sentence that the Bale characters' "Twin" is the one who ties the wrong knot because he wasn't there when the decision to tie the other knot was made. At the time I just assumed he tied the wrong knot on purpose and the denied it later, but it appears he really didn't know. My enjoyment of this movie has just increased ten-fold from this realization.

Have you seen the Departed sir???

That takes the cake...

One thing to note is that almost all of your evidence is coming from a most likely unreliable narrator in Angier. One of the movie's central themes is the idea of living under conditions of total deception for the purposes of the art - see the old man with the fishbowl early on and Borden with his twin. Given that, and that it's a movie about stage magic that consciously structures itself parallel to the magic tricks it discusses, and I don't think it's unrealistic to consider the possibility that Angier is feeding you bull****. So the shot of hats or cats or whatever outside Tesla's compound and Angier's stories about not knowing which would come out of the box don't necessarily have to be taken at face value - both of those are coming either directly from Angier, or from his diary which he has written for Borden's benefit.

This leaves the final shot with the bodies in the tanks. There certainly are many tanks, but if I remember correctly, you can only see one face in the tanks; how do we know what's going on in the other tanks? We already know there is an Angier lookalike because we've seen him earlier in the movie. And, again, this is one of the central themes of the movie. Angier seems to genuinely think that Borden is doing some sort of real transportation; Cutter keeps insisting there must be a lookalike, that's the only way to do the trick, and is ultimately proven right. Given all of this, I think the movie is trying to very strongly suggest that Tesla's machine is a hoax, and the one dead clone we see in the tank at the end is Angier's lookalike.

The one major hole in this theory is that I don't have a good explanation for how Angier knows when to rig it for Borden so that Angier-lookalike will die. The one possibility I can see is that Angier told Cutter he needed him in "front of house" for this trick, so it's possible that Cutter was his unknowing confederate and allowed him to set it up. This is a weakness, I'll admit. However, I think that's an exceedingly more likely tack for the movie to be heading for. The idea that a movie that is fundamentally about using deceit and deception to accomplish things that look impossible would introduce genuine magic (and none of this crap about how it's Tesla and so it's plausibly scientific, please) seems unlikely, dumb, or lazy. It's certainly possible that it could be one of those, but given what the movie is about and Cutter's statement at the end along the lines of "you don't really care enough to figure out what's actually happening here" (repeating his statement from the beginning of the movie about why stage magic works on audiences) I think my interpretation makes a lot more sense.

EDIT: The ending really pissed me off the first time I saw the movie, but I liked the rest of it enough and was teased by Cutter's final statement that I watched it again and started thinking pretty hard about how you could explain it all away. After doing that, I gained a lot of respect for this movie, and now I think it's probably Nolan's best, and I really like Christopher Nolan. I'd recommend Following to anybody who hasn't seen it yet.