The Prestige Movie

I am still going to college at ECU. I have a lot of work every week that keeps me busy most of the time. I saw The Prestige with Hugh Jackson the other week. It was a good movie. It made me think about what really happened in the 19th century to pull off such great magic tricks. A lot of people were frauds, and many were criminals that manipulated poor people into being guinea pigs for magic tricks that inevitably would go wrong. They went wrong at least 50% of the time before they went right and they looked like death traps. They had tricks in the movie like a woman dropped into a tank of water with a lid on it with her hands tied. It was easy to get away with murder if you wanted someone killed. They would claim they warned the volunteers about the risk involved and that it was an accident. Real magic does not put people's lives on the line. These shows were illegal. Many people died that had no one to speak for them like prostitutes and people with mental problems whose family had died. When they did, the travelling magicians could just be moving on to the next unsuspecting town that had never heard of them before. There was not internet back then to keep them up to date with the latest news. This movie made me think. I was pleasantly surprised.