Sunday, June 24, 2007

The Prestige, Or What If Batman Fought Wolverine?

Last night Vicki and I watched The Prestige on Blu-Ray DVD. We own exactly one Blu-Ray disc so far, and I'd delayed viewing it during the whole PS/3 Saga for obvious reasons. Now that things were good again in that department, though, it was time to give Blu-Ray a chance!

We definitely enjoyed the High Definition quality of the movie, even if we don't - yet! - own a TV that supports 1080P resolution. Everything looked great, but as I always say: the difference between DVD and HD-DVD just isn't dramatic enough to wow me, unlike the contrast between HD and SD. So there's definitely no hurry for us to go out and replace our 150+ DVDs with HD equivalents, and even future DVD purchases will skew more toward the regular DVD format in most cases. If the price difference between the two formats were less, that might not be true. But as it is, only the biggest, most eye-popping movies will see us spending the extra $10 (Spider-Man 3, perhaps?)

As for the motion picture itself, we both loved it! Since it features Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as competing stage magicians, in an escalating battle that quickly turns violent, I couldn't help but think of the comic book characters they've each recently portrayed on the big screen, to the delight of comic fanboys and fangirls everywhere. It seems to me that Bale is the better of the two actors, but they both were excellent here, despite some issues with their accents. The plot is full of twists and turns, almost all of which Vicki and/or I saw coming, resulting in lots of Pause moments while one of us - usually me - ventured a theory forth that the other had already formed by that point! It's being billed as one of those movies that you'll "want to watch a second time, right away" and I'm tempted to agree (although we haven't yet). Not for the usual reason of seeing what it looks like once you know the big twists, but simply because there's so much story to it, and so many different time periods covered, in seemingly-random order, that it's hard to take it all in with just one viewing. It's also one of those movies about obsession that makes you glad that neither you, nor anyone you (hopefully) know and love, is quite that crazy!

This was definitely the best of the movies we've seen so far during our current rash of DVD watching.

No comments: