the illusionist

Rental service was back to normal this weekend with the illusionist.

It's weird how sometimes there's nothing in a particular genre and then several things come along at once. The Illusionist was released in 2006, the same year as The Prestige.

I reviewed the prestige a while back (or if it was before I started blogging, be assured I have watched it) and quite enjoyed it. Why it's similar to the illusionist, if you can't guess or don't know already is that they're both Magic films.

I appreciate Magic films is not really a genre as such, but that's the best phrase to describe them. They're also both based on books and both are set roughly at the turn of the previous century. Certainly they have a Victorian feel to them.

Both are also focused on grand stage magic, rather than smaller sleight of hand stuff and both feature a "grand illusion" as the central crux of the film. Both also try to blur the lines between real magic and mere illusions. They differ mainly in the central theme, I would say. The prestige was about a rivalry between two magicians, where the illusionist is really a love story at heart.

But they're both similar in the sense that both are entertaining and I enjoyed them both.

There's a bit of a difficult nowadays with films based in the world of magic, because we all know that movies sometimes feature a lot of CGI. And CGI is getting to the stage where it's so good that it's possible to make unreal things seem real.

So the problem magic has on the big screen is that the true skill that is behind magic, such as things like misdirection or even sleight of hand, can simply be faked. You don't really need an actual skilled magician, or a clever contraption to pull of a trick in a film, you can just let computers and animators do their thing.

And at points it's quite obvious that CGI is how they're doing some of the tricks. However to some degree, this actually works in the illusionist's favour, because part of the story we're being shown is the idea that maybe the illusionist Eisenheim really can do actual magic.

Part of the idea is that he's so good he's got tricks that people genuinely can't figure out. He's either one step ahead of the current magic skill level or he can do real magic - and by mixing real tricks with a bit of CGI it helps that idea more than it does undermine the practical magic trick side of things.

Something else that helps is the treatment that's been done to the film, which makes it seem like a really old print. Initially I wasn't sure about this, but after a while it becomes kind of natural and really helps you feel that it's a story from that era.

This is also aided by the (roughly) consistent accents everyone uses and some truly involving performances. It's also a good story, with an engaging, well portrayed love story.

So yeah, overall I really enjoyed the film.