Hi, everyone! It’s Story Sunday again and this week I’m talking about The Prestige. This movie is an adaptation of a novel with the same name by Christopher Priest. As with all adaptations, the question arises as to which version was better, but this is one of the few cases where I can’t decide. So, for this Story Sunday, I’m just going to take a little time and look at both versions of the story.

The novel has quite a few things going for it. The two main characters, Borden (Christian Bale) and Anjier (Hugh Jackman), are seen reading journals in the movie. Well, in the novel, the reader is actually reading the journals and that’s how the story is told. Anjier’s account, if I remember correctly, is dated and numbered. Borden’s journal is quite different. Rather than being a daily account of his life, it seems to be written in the future and looks back on his life. The style is amazing and the format is truly a different way of storytelling.

In both cases, you have the theme of obsession. Both magicians throw their lives away in a feud but have different ideas about why the feud is taking place. The audience sees that the obsession can manifest itself in different ways. For Anjier, the implications are personal. For Borden, it’s the people around him who suffer. His wife suffers, his daughter, his brother, everyone else suffers for the sake of the performance. Anjier sells himself, his soul, his humanity, to become better than Borden.

Now, there’s a spoiler ahead for those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the book. In the movie, Anjier’s machine creates copies of himself. However, they’re true copies, they’re like clones. This leads to the conclusion that he killed himself, or his clone, in each show. The novel is different. The novel produces what seems to be a corpse. The new Anjier appears on a balcony and the old body has to be disposed of. The real difference comes at the end. Borden tampers with the machine during a show and the machine turns off halfway through the teleportation. This leaves a physically sick Anjier, and a wraith Anjier. The wraith can actually never die. He’s an incarnation of obsession that will never leave the family of the world. Both versions have amazing moral and personal implications. I really can’t say which one I prefer, so I’m glad to have experienced both versions.

Now it’s your turn! Which version of the story do you prefer? What do you think of these two men who sacrifice everything for obsession?