20 Things You Somehow Missed In The Prestige

By Richard Hiron / August 26, 2020

Christopher Nolan is often regarded as "The Magician" of modern cinema and, even though his considerable talents have not been able to prevent his current film, Tenet from being delayed (it was released in the UK on 26th August 2020 and will hit the US on 3rd September 2020), it is still possible to appreciate the director's back catalogue, which includes The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017).

However, one of the hidden gems in his filmography is his fifth feature-length movie, The Prestige (2006), which he made between Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Filled with the director's trademark mysticism and intrigue, declining to let audiences in on the intricacies of the "magic trick" at the core of the plot until the film is in its closing stages, The Prestige could possibly be considered to be Nolan's most personal venture, not in the plot itself, but because, like the director, it declines to put all of the pieces to the puzzle together until it is ready to do so.

As with a great deal of Christopher Nolan's work, there is a lot that can be missed in The Prestige, so much so that this list of 20 items only starts to scratch the surface.

So, "are you watching closely"?

20. The Mysticism Of An Undiscovered Egypt

Magic and Ancient Egypt often go hand-in-hand, since the mystery of the ancient pharaohs helps to highlight the glamorous nature of the act.

If audiences watch closely during the magic act of illusionist, Virgil (J. Paul Moore) at which Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) meets Sarah (Rebecca Hall) for the first time, they will see two guardians of Tutankhamun's tomb standing at either end of the magician's stage.

Since The Prestige takes place during the 1890s and King Tut's tomb was not discovered until 1922, the presence of the guardians of that tomb on any sort of stage would be a physical impossibility.