"For goodness sake, Tesla...I'll have to confiscate this. Just think about your carbon footprint, man!"
And we light up our lives...
As promised yesterday (10.22.2006 NEWS: THE PRESTIGE IS THE #1 MOVIE IN AMERICA!), here are more excerpts from several reviews of The Prestige which include the relevant Bowie bits for those that don't want to read the complete articles. For those that do, simply click on the name of each publication.
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New York Times
That story is nudged to its wildly curlicued ending ? don?t worry, I won?t give it away ? by David Bowie, whose dry, amusing impersonation of the inventor Nikola Tesla allows the film to brush up gently against the real world. Tesla?s fierce rivalry with Thomas Edison is alluded to, and it suggests an actual historical counterpart to Angier and Borden?s struggle for dominance.
Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall give strong performances in small roles and David Bowie is barely recognizable but very good as Nikola Tesla the only non fictional character in the piece.
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Rolling Stone
Everyone is focused on an illusion (The Transported Man) cooked up by electricity whiz Nikola Tesla (yes, that is David Bowie, and he's mesmerizing).
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Chicago Sun-Times
Two other characters deserve mention: David Bowie, who delivers a truly delicious performance as the one historical character in the film -- inventor and Thomas Edison rival Nikola Tesla -- and Andy Serkis, best known for his role as Gollum/Smeagol in "The Lord of the Rings" films, who is wonderfully funny as Tesla's assistant Mr. Alley.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer
A side trip to the mountains of Colorado, where the famous (and real-life) inventor Nikola Tesla is working on his coils and constructs, is The Prestige's big piece of misdirection. David Bowie plays the scientist with a simmering mad energy, and Andy Serkis is his sycophantic sidekick. It is Angier who has come here, to learn the secrets behind "The Transported Man" machine that Tesla was said to have designed for arch-nemesis Borden.
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Star Tribune
As in his chronologically warped masterpiece, "Memento," Nolan moves forward and backward in time, and his main characters tiptoe along the delicate line between obsession and insanity. Angier, a gifted showman, achieves fame first while Borden, a more technically gifted illusionist, slowly gains renown. Borden's breakthrough effect is "The Transported Man," in which he apparently moves from one side of the stage to the other by passing through a pair of unconnected, freestanding doors. As their duel comes to a boil, Angier commissions a transporting device from the maverick electrical genius Nikola Tesla (played with an air of somber wisdom by David Bowie, whose eyes snap and crackle).
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St. Petersburg Times
There are doppelgangers and double-crossers, spies and counterspies, romance and marital strife. There's a trip to Colorado, where Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie in mesmerizing, menacing fashion) builds a Star Trek-style transporter that can turn the trick into reality.
In addition to the fine performances of Bale, Jackman and Bowie, there's yet another great one by Michael Caine, and a solid but small turn for Scarlett Johansson. The costuming, the scenery and the effects are all phenomenal.
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Cleveland.com
You've got to love a cast list that includes this tantalizing prospect: ". . . and David Bowie as the crazed scientist."
The former Ziggy Stardust plays a mysterious electricity expert in "The Prestige," a rollicking good magician mystery set in turn-of-the-century London. (That would be the 19th century turning into the 20th.)
All of the actors are in fine form. Jackman and Bale push each other to the edge of sweaty remorse. Bowie is quietly effective as a fictionalized version of inventor Nikola Tesla, who dabbles, in the film anyway, with a molecule-defying transport machine. But with all the big names on the bill, the best performance is turned in by Rebecca Hall, as Borden's worried wife.
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USA TODAY
Jackman believes that Bale is responsible for the death of his wife (Piper Perabo), who had been their assistant while they were apprentice magicians. His determination to get the better of Bale grows into an obsessive fervor. Bale becomes equally intent upon outdoing and outwitting Jackman. In the process of one-upping each other, they run up against an errant inventor (a wonderful mustachioed David Bowie) whose experiments with electricity have been disavowed by the scientific community.
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New York Daily News
Finally, Angier travels to the Colorado lab of electrical engineer and mad genius Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) and orders a machine that will help him top Borden's trick. Some of the ensuing special-effects scenes border on sci-fi campiness, but of the two magic shows now in movie theaters - "The Illusionist" was released in August - "The Prestige" is by far the better-looking and more ambitious.
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The Washington Post
The other turn-of-the-century-magic movie this year, of course, was "The Illusionist," which starred Edward Norton as a conjurer in Vienna who enters into a crafty cat-and-mouse game with a police chief played by Paul Giamatti.
"The Prestige" also features two terrific actors -- Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman -- playing off each other, as prestidigitators competing for fame in 19th-century London. Throw Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and David Bowie into the mix and you have a classy, intriguing thriller that keeps viewers guessing but, unlike its less twisty but more opaque predecessor, gives viewers a fighting chance to figure it all out before the third-act Big Reveal.
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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Angier's quest to learn (and steal) the secret leads him to Colorado Springs, where he hopes to build his own version of the trick with the help of real-life electrical engineer Nikola Tesla (unearthly David Bowie, in a literally hair-raising performance).
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The Miami Herald
Nolan, who has become an assured, stylish filmmaker in the span of only a few films, keeps the complicated plot spinning, constantly throwing in new elements (like David Bowie as a mysterious scientist, or Scarlett Johansson as a magician's assistant) without taking the focus away from the competition between Jackman and Bale.
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Fox News
The fact that Tesla is played by none other than David Bowie only makes his character more cool.
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Great stuff. With reviews like these it's hardly surprising that The Prestige is the top grossing film in America right now.
