The Prestige

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.