8 Fan Theories That Totally Change Your Favourite Movies

6. There's A Third Twist - The Prestige

You could spend days dissecting the symbolic and narrative brilliance of The Prestige's dual twist ending, but for the sake of brevity let's keep things as simple as they can be when dealing with Christopher Nolan. The final scene reveals that Borden (Christian Bale) and Angier (Hugh Jackman) achieved the same trick (The Transporting Man) through two very different, but equally soul-destroying, methods- the formerlived a sharedlife with his twin, while the latter drowned himself on stage every night so his complex (and totally real) magic could work.

But that's not the end of it, at least according this fan theory that has been doing the rounds. Turns out Tesla's machine didn't actually work and was all smoke and mirrors aspart of Angier's plot to incriminate Borden. The Real Transported Man, presented in the film as genuine magic, was actually realised with a double, just like every version seen throughout the film. The whole drowning element was only introduced on the final night, when Angier knew Borden's curiosity would get the better of him.

The main fuel for this theory is that only one of the drowned Angier's is actually shownon screen, meaning that there's nothing Borden, or the audience, sees that actually suggests the whole clone machine stuff is true - that body could have been the double's, potentially planted by a vengeful Cutter. Could Nolan have actually pulled a magic slight-of-hand in his movie about magicians?

There's some pretty huge inconsistencies that need to be got over for this to gel - there's no satisfying explanation of why Cutter would identifythe dead double's body as Angier's and it requires at least one scene (the flashback to Angier first testing the machine on himself and killing the duplicate) to be entirely fictional, which goes against the rest of the film's realism - but as a fulfilment of Michael Caine's "you're not really looking, you want to be fooled" spiel it's right on the jaw-dropping money.