Christopher Nolan is a rare filmmaker who is consistently both a box office draw and awards darling. Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a phenomenon, grossing almost $1 billion worldwide and winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey is even more ambitious, as the story is a sprawling ancient epic that defines myth-making.
Nolan keeps outdoing himself in terms of spectacle, but The Prestige is one of his earlier films that is a 10/10 masterpiece, yet it is often overlooked. Sandwiched between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, 2006’s The Prestige is criminally underrated, but it contains the best structure and plot twist of Nolan’s filmography.
The Prestige Isn’t Considered One Of Nolan’s Best Movies, But It Should Be
Fans continuously debate Nolan’s best movies — The Dark Knight, Inception, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk — but The Prestige is rarely part of the discussion. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is a modest 77%, placing it ninth in Nolan’s filmography, and it’s often remembered as a smaller film that came just before the game-changing superhero blockbuster The Dark Knight.
The Prestige is Nolan at his most disciplined. It channels all his favorite themes — obsession, rivalry, sacrifice, and the cost of greatness — without the bloat that sometimes defines his later work. The nonlinear structure isn’t a gimmick here, but a fully motivated device built around dueling diaries and unreliable narrators.
Christian Bale and Michael Caine deliver nuanced work just one year after Batman Begins, resulting in a film that rewards rewatching more than almost anything Nolan has made. The Prestige is often discounted, but it’s subtly Nolan’s most underrated movie.
The Prestige Has Nolan’s Best Twist Ever
Nolan has delivered plenty of twists, but most of them reframe identity (like Miranda Tate in The Dark Knight Rises), leave audiences tangled in exposition (Tenet), or are so structurally complex they’re impossible to predict on a first pass (Memento). The Prestige stands apart because its final reveal doesn’t just surprise, it recontextualizes every scene that came before it. The ending is simple, shocking, and completely earned, elevating the entire story without relying on a lore dump or puzzle-box structure.
The Prestige is full of small details that are invisible the first time around: Borden instantly guessing Chung Ling Soo’s secret, Borden’s wife noting that his injuries seem oddly fresh, and dozens of quiet character moments that feel like throwaways until the truth clicks. Furthermore, The Prestige has Nolan’s greatest twist ever.
Nolan Shines In Contained Adaptations Like The Prestige
Fallon (Christian Bale) in jail in The Prestige
The Prestige is based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel, though Nolan trims the frame story and holds the major reveal until the very end. When Nolan is not adapting source material, his themes sometimes get so weighty that the plot strains under them, and characters start serving ideas rather than feeling fully human.
His most confusing films are original (Memento, Interstellar, Tenet). Comparatively, some of his most celebrated come from the creative limitations of adaptation (Batman, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk), which bodes well for his upcoming Odyssey adaptation.
The Prestige benefits from having fascinating source material that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan could streamline. By simplifying the structure and cutting the frame, they sharpened the ending of The Prestige into something more dramatic and visual compared to the book’s broader, more introspective conclusion.
Release Date
October 20, 2006
Runtime
130 minutes
