Chris Nolan and Jon Nolan don't seem to make bad movies. Remember how Bryan Singer was this wunderkind after The Usual Suspects. Well Chris Nolan is like him except he (Nolan) made like 5 Usual Suspect-level movies (Singer made Superman Returns).
You've got Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale playing rival magicians in 1800s England. Not only do you got Jackman and Bale throwing down (well, not in a fistfight or anything) you got Bale playing a character named Alfred while shotting dialogue at Michael Caine! Anyways, one magician may have caused the death of the other magician's wife by fucking up a trick, so both magicians try to outdo the other and become the greatest. There's a lot of insider peeks here, how the magician work is mostly showmanship with a behind-the-scenes dude doing a lot of trick-rigging and such.
But the best shit is the rumination on the relationship between the magician and the audience. How a viewer sort of really knows how a trick is pulled off but sort of overthinks into believing. Like how in regular spheres, the sawing the woman in half trick should equal a woman each in two boxes. Or there's meditation on the structure of a magic trick and how it's sort of like a dramatic narrative ending in a catharsis. Oh, and the parallels between all this and the nature of film, how we're able to watch and disregard the technical chicanery and such. There are some storytelling flaws in the film; beauty is, though, that you can explain them all away as commentary on the artifice of film / magic. "That part doesn't make sense," I'd said, "or maybe, that's the point, that the director is manipulating me like the magician manipulates the audience and the director did that to make me remember." Or something like that.
Anyways, this movie is awesome; fucking twists like you wouldn't believe. And there's lots of them.
Oh, and remember how I was sort of down on Scarlett re: Iron Man 2? Well, she's in this too. She has an English accent, which makes a huge, huge difference. In my pants.
