The Prestige

For the past few weeks we have been working on our tragic hero movie posters in class. We choose The Prestige for our movie poster. My part of the tragedy that I studied was the catastrophe. In our essays, which we turned in recently, I compared my element of the tragedy to the catastrophe in Oedipus Rex. The Prestige has a very complex plot, where two main characters are profiled, it moves between present day and flashbacks. So at some points in the movie it was very hard to understand, though after watching it a few times it all seemed to make more sense. My favorite part of the project was when we finally got to design the poster in a thematic way that related to the movie.

Blue was very for the theme of the poster because it is the color of electricity which played a huge role in the movie. Electricity is what produced the many clones of Robert Angier, the protagonist in the story. The clones in the movie are what fuelled his hubris and made him feel unstoppable, even though later on in the movie he does realize what he is doing is wrong, by killing one of the clones every night. The birds on our poster also are important because it shows how some birds (Borden, and every other clone) survive the trap and the other, darker, falling birds are the ones that didn't make it (Robert Angier). Lastly the red ball which is bouncing off of every picture shows  the obsession that Angier had with his tricks. Angier became obsessed with these tricks because he was intrigued by the reaction from the audience every time he performed it. The theme was by far the my favorite part about this project.