The Prestige

• The film of the opening sequence I'm going to analyse is called 'The Prestige', which is a thriller drama mystery.
• The story takes place in London 1995, as you can tell from the characters' attires as well as the accent of the narrator.
• As the narrator talks through the three main parts of a magic trick, the clips are shown corresponding the explanation of the three parts. Until it comes to the third part, the hardest part, called 'The Prestige'. When the third part is explained, the clips show one magic trick going right and another life-threatening. Once it shows the drowning of one of the main characters, it goes on into the court scene where they debate about the death of this magician. The order of the events in the opening sequence is really significant as it is repeated again throughout the film. And the contrast between a simple magic trick that goes right according to the three parts and one that kills the magician itself, shocks the audience and allows it to be engraved in the minds of the audience so when they film progresses, the audience will start to understand how the plot unravels.
• The events that occur in the opening sequence link together very distinctly without any further explanation needed.
• The first character that is shown is Cutter(Michael Caine), the mastermind behind the magic tricks of the victim that drowned who was Robert Angier(Christian Bale), one of the main characters. We were also introduced to the other main character, Alfred Borden(Hugh Jackman) who was the man being accused of setting up the trap and murdering Robert Angier. All this information is shown clearly throughout the whole opening scene, especially the court scene.
• The information provided to the audience in the opening scene is only enough for the audience to understand that a magic trick has gone wrong and it was possibly a murder. Not much of the whole plot is revealed; the whole story plot itself is a twist. No one would ever think of what the ending would be like despite knowing the genre conventions and watching the opening scene. Since it's about magic, and like a magic trick, a secret cannot be told, so they have made the opening scene very open ended, so that it could only be revealed what is happening, near the end of the film.
• In my opinion, the audience must know that who the main characters are, even though in the opening scene, one of them dies. That scene is very significant in the film in many ways, so if you do not remember the main characters as well as that scene, then the whole film will be very confusing for the audience.