Actually, the movie is about a rivalry between two magicians in 19th century England. Jackman becomes obsessed with Bale's "Transported Man" trick, an illusion in which Bale enters one closet and emerges from another closet across the stage almost instantaneously. Driven to compete, independently wealthy Jackman ultimately travels to Colorado Springs and employs a financially-strapped Nikola Tesla to create for him a machine that will actually accomplish the trick for real. If Tesla is to be believed, his machine almost gets it right. Instead of transporting something, it creates a copy of the original and transports that -- or perhaps transports the original while leaving a copy in its place.

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When people talk about the end of the movie, it's funny how often they talk about this scene, in which Bale reveals how he did his trick. Apparently, he had an identical twin, and the two men were never seen in public together. While one was the magician "Borden," the other would wear makeup and live as his assistant "Fallon." Even their wife, girlfriend, and daughter didn't know the truth. Conversely, Jackman explains how each night, he risked death performing his trick, as one of his Tesla-generated doubles had to be murdered, and he never knew if he would be the one.

I always loved The Prestige, but that ending never really worked for me. I didn't like the idea of a Tesla magic box, or the reveal of the ending: a warehouse of 100 murdered Hugh Jackmans, one from each of the times he performed the trick and had to dispose of his freshly-minted double. Recently, my friend asked me if I were of the camp that believes Tesla's box didn't work -- that Tesla, in financial need, just put on a show to create the illusion it worked, and that Jackman was merely trying to convince Bale of the same. "Impossible," I said. "We see like 100 Jackmans in tanks." That was my memory. But my memory lied. I was tricked. The movie shows only one murdered Jackman (and we know that Jackman used a double in an earlier version of the trick). What's more, the very ending of the movie contains Michael Caine's narration, which explains how as we look for the answer to a trick, we're not really looking, because we want to be fooled.