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The Prestige
Warner Home Video
Certificate: 12
Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johanssen
Director: Christopher Nolan
Aspect ratio: 2.4:1
Running time: 130mins
Audio options: English Dolby Digital Plus 5.1, French 5.1, German 5.1, Castellano 5.1
Film synopsis: Two magicians take umbrage with each other in turn of the century London with increasingly vicious, mysterious and above all sinister results that will keep you riveted to the screen right until the last haunting frame. And then you'll find yourself thinking about it for days afterwards.
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Picture quality |
This might say 'Warner Bros' on the box, but somehow it just doesn't feel like a Warner Bros Blu-ray transfer. Which is to say that its picture quality is, appropriately enough, simply magical.If this sounds a bit harsh on Warners, I'm sorry. But there's just no ignoring the sheer delight of being able to watch The Prestige's many dark scenes without having to suffer the grain and dot crawl that can plague such material on so many other Warners titles. Also evident during dark scenes is the disc's fantastic contrast range, as it presents the blackest of blacks with total, cinematic authority. And these superb black levels are given added punch by the way they are counterpointed by dazzlingly bright, rich colours and whites, most notably during any of the on-stage 'performance' scenes. Maybe the colour palette will let this 1080p VC-1 transfer down? Not a bit of it. Skin tones throughout seem wonderfully natural, despite the film's many tricky lighting conditions; there's no striping of colour blends; and vibrant shots look positively radiant. Yet more good news comes from the quite stunning sharpness of the transfer, which reveals every hair on every actor's head, every weave in their plush Victorian suits, and pretty much every pixel of everything else too. This ensures that the disc does full justice to the film's terrific production design, really making you feel like you're in late Victorian England. Edges are immaculate too, with no ghosting or jaggedness, and motion is fluid and sharp. In other words, this is about as good as HD gets. And that, my fine HD-loving people, is very, very good indeed. |
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Sound quality |
First up, a disappointment: the only English soundtracks on The Prestige Blu-ray are a Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 mix (using 640kbps) and an English Descriptive Narration. There's no 'HD' audio mix, not even an uncompressed PCM offering. BooOn the upside, the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is pretty likeable. This isn't by any means a high-octane action thriller, so obviously you're not going to get the fancy show-off soundtrack histrionics found on films like Mission: Impossible III. But some of the magic set-pieces and electrical experiments do find the soundtrack leaping to life in pulsating fashion. Plus the film-makers show an impeccable sense of dramatic timing in when to use the score, when to ramp up the ambient effects a little, and when to just let silence speak for itself. |
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Extra features |
By the standards of most high profile HD disc releases, the extras on the Blu-ray of The Prestige are a bit impoverished - and certainly not as fulsome as such an excellent film deserves. But at least what you do get carries enough quality to compensate at least a little for the shortage of quantity. Here's the full list:1. 20-minute documentary entitled The Director's Notebook: The Cinematic Sleight of Hand of Christopher Nolan. This is broken down into six individually selectable sections.
2. 26 stills of the film.
3. 27 stills showing the costumes and sets.
4. 21 stills showing behind the scenes footage.
5. 10 stills showing poster art used in the film.
6. Theatrical trailer.
For a review of every feature on the disc, click here.
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Presentation |
The Prestige on Blu-ray is a typically dull Warners effort in presentation terms. You just get a single static 'main menu' featuring uninspiring text over a still of Tesla's Vanishing Man machine, plus entirely run of the mill pop up menus that feature no graphics other than illustrative stills in the chapter selection option. Yawnsville, Arizona.
The Last Word It's nice to see Warners doing justice to this really excellent, criminally overlooked gem with arguably the best HD image quality the studio has managed to date. But such pristine images surely deserve to be partnered by some sort of HD audio format, and a film of such sophistication is simply crying out for a far more comprehensive set of extra features. |
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 | 66% |
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The scene where Angier, Borden and Cutter discuss the boringness of Virgil's act behind the scenes of a theatre is awash with subtle fine details, rich colours, sharp motion, image depth and perfect skin tones. And as such it provides a spectacular example of how high definition can hugely enhance relatively intimate, internal scenes as well as grand vistas. |
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Bizarrely the UK's Blu-ray of The Prestige carries some key differences to its US equivalent. For starters, while our disc comes courtesy of Warners and uses a VC-1 transfer, the US one apparently came courtesy of Buena Vista/Disney, and used MPEG4. Furthermore, the US release carried an uncompressed 5.1 PCM soundtrack option tragically absent from our UK version. Boo. However, on the plus side us lucky, lucky Brits do get a theatrical trailer for the film whereas our friends across the pond had to suffer instead the shameless inclusion of two trailers for forthcoming films (The Guardian and Invincible, if you care, which you don't).
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The 'Chinese' magician featured near the start of the film, Chung Ling Soo, is based on a real historical figure. Ling Soo was in fact a white American called William Robinson who came up with the idea of pretending to be Chinese in a bid to exploit the late 19th century taste for the exotic. And as is discussed in the film, he apparently never came out of his Chinese character when in public. His career came to a violent end in 1918 when, in classic magician style, a bullet catching trick 'misfired'. Apparently his last words were 'My God, I've been shot' - which were also the first English words he'd spoken on stage for 19 years.
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