来源：Sailor
By Coco Ruan from MYP9(2)
The movie The Prestige is about the competition between two eminent magicians, Robert Angier and Alfred Borden. Borden accidentally kills Angier’s wife. Every time Angier sees Borden and his family, he feels that Borden steals his life and his happiness. In response, Angier shoots Borden during performance. As time goes, they have an almost morbid competition. They don’t care about improving their own magic by themselves any more. Instead, they try to steal magics and make each other infamous. In the end, Angier duplicates himself and kills his double in order to frame Borden and sentence him to death. However, he finds that Borden doesn’t die due to his double. What’s more, Borden’s life isn’t as great as Angier thinks because he needs to share his life with his double.
To me, the movie is not a story about jealousy. It’s more about people’s perception of things and what things truly are. People’s so-called enemies are in fact enemies in their imagination. Thus, we always overestimate our true enemies and exaggerate their achievements. Even though sometimes our enemies do have something more outstanding than we do, they must have paid a certain price. In the movie, the price Borden pays is the death of his wife and having an incomplete life.. However, from his enemy Angier’s perspective, he has lost nothing and is just enjoying his life. In fact, Angier’s true enemy is himself, his lack of trust and his complaints about life all the time. He doesn’t want to believe that his enemy is an equal as himself who lost a lot to gain money and fame. The only difference is not that his enemy is luckier than him, but is that his enemy pays a higher price.
There is an impressive line in the movie, “People don’t care about the secrets. They like to be fooled”. This theory is not only applicable to people’s attitude towards magic, but also applicable to daily life. When we watch a TV drama or read a novel, we always feel depressed when the hero and the heroine break up in the end. In fact, if we can think out of the box and look at their relationship logically, we can easily find that they are really not a good match from the beginning. Despite the main characters’ good-looking, the only reason why we expect them to live happily together as if they were in fairy tales is that we want to be fooled.
In conclusion, The Prestige is such a great movie that you shouldn’t miss because it really induces a multitude of your thoughts about life.