Title: The PrestigeRelease Date: 02/20/2007
Label/Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Touchstone
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Retail Price: $29.99
Genre: Drama Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Piper Perabo, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Samantha Mahurin, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame (III), Mark Ryan, Roger Rees, Jamie Harris, Monty Stuart, Ron Perkins, Ricky Jay, J. Paul Moore, Anthony De Marco
Director: Christopher Nolan
Running Time: 130
DVD Video Options: AC-3, Color, Dolby
DVD Audio Options: English, Original Language; French, Subtitled; Spanish, Subtitled; French, Dubbed; Spanish, Dubbed
UPC Code: 786936705157
Award-winning actors Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson star in THE PRESTIGE, the twisting, turning story that, like all great magic tricks, stays with you. Two young, passionate magicians, Robert Angier (Jackman), a charismatic showman, and Alfred Borden (Bale), a gifted illusionist, are friends and partners until one fateful night when their biggest trick goes terribly wrong. Now the bitterest of enemies, they will stop at nothing to learn each other's secrets. As their rivalry escalates into a total obsession full of deceit and sabotage, they risk everything to become the greatest magician of all time. But nothing is as it seems, so watch closely. And be prepared to watch it again and again.
The Prestige
By Ed Hulse -- Video Business, 1/8/2007
Buena Vista, color, PG-13, 130 min. plus supplements, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, widescreen, Street: Feb. 20, $29.99; First Run: W, Oct. 2006, $52 mil.
Christopher Nolan's lovingly crafted adaptation of Christopher Priest's novel about rival magicians in the Victorian era suffered by comparison to The Illusionist (which, frankly, was the superior picture), but The Prestige deserved better and will likely achieve greater success on DVD. On the basis of star power alone—the cast includes Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and David Bowie—The Prestige merits reevaluation, and the plot intricacies that befuddled some theatrical audiences won't hinder home viewers, who have the luxury of repeating scenes they might find confusing. The extras, however, will prove no help at all in bolstering the title's chances in sell-through venues. Despite the wealth of fascinating material from which intriguing supplements might have been fashioned, Buena Vista has taken the easy way out, stringing together in the most perfunctory way an assortment of behind-the-scenes snippets and dressing them up with routine talking-head excerpts featuring Nolan and his principal players. The entire film is built around illusions and the art of the stage magician, but the extras offer no substantive historical material to put into their proper context the characters played by Jackman and Bale. The disc cries out for a supplement on famous magicians and illusionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Real-life scientific wizard Nikola Tesla, superbly portrayed in the movie by Bowie, gets short shrift in a criminally brief featurette that identifies him as a well-ahead-of-his-time genius but offers next to nothing about his actual accomplishments. It's grouped with similarly short, equally superficial segments under the general title "Director's Notebook: The Cinematic Sleight of Hand of Christopher Nolan." A secondary supplement, "The Art of The Prestige," offers stills galleries of sets, costumes, posters and so on. And that's it.
