Dueling magician reviews!
Sunday, July 15th, 2007OK, so as vacation wraps up for another year, I finally checked out The Illusionist on the movie channel and finally I can do a compare and contrast with The Prestige, a movie which I loved. Now, after seeing both, I hardly consider this a fair fight, because I think Prestige was one of the best movies of 2006, whereas The Illusionist was just really good. That being said, we can break it down to a few important factors if we want to compare:
1) The actors. Prestige featured Wolverine v. Batman, whereas Illusionist had Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, both more likely to be found in a movie like Sideways. Definitely the badass factor goes to Prestige here. However, I’m more likely to enjoy an Edward Norton movie than a Hugh Jackman movie, while Giamatti v. Bale is a tie, so Illusionist wins in that regard. So this is a tie overall.
2) The hotties. Vicious drag-out fight here. I’m all about Scarlett Johanson, to the point where I’m volunteering to go see The Nanny later this month and making no secret as to the reason why, and that scene with Jessica Biel in the gay firefighter movie is almost enough to make me check it out on DVD if everything else in the store is rented and I’m drunk. I dunno, man, this is tough. Putting a gun to my head, I’d say that Biel is hotter, but it would be an agonizing decision. I do think that both dying so early in their respective movies was a tragedy either way, but Jessica was a bit of a whore in the Illusionist so I’m giving Scarlet the win here.
3) The big plot twists. Illusionist actually made sense, whereas Prestige was just kinda weird when it came down to it. But sometimes I dig that. Sometimes it’s cool when a movie has the guts to be all “The rules of the real world do NOT have to apply here”, whereas the Illusionist was all about telling you up front that it was all a trick, and letting you figure out the parameters of that trick yourself. I’ll give the win to Prestige here for pushing the envelope a bit more.
4) The magic. Illusionist was so far outside of the realm of what 18th century Vienna stage magicians would have been pulling off that it was actually a bit hard to suspend disbelief, whereas Prestige actually explained most of the tricks and then made you WORK to figure out how The Big Trick was accomplished. Eisenheim growing oranges via trick flowerpot was cool, but it was done by CGI magic and not real magic, whereas pretty much everything done in the Prestige was laid out step-by-step and can (and has) been pulled off by other magicians since the time of the movie. Except of course for the teleporting thing, for obvious reasons for those who have seen the movie.
Overall, I just plain liked Prestige more and felt like I was being taken on a ride of coolness by cool people, whereas the Illusionist was stylish and had a more solid plot, but never really cut loose with the goofiness of David Bowie playing Tesla like Prestige did. I recommend seeing both and wish they’d put out a DVD 2-pack with them, but I’d watch Prestige again whereas Illusionist was pretty much a one-and-done movie for me.
