I need to understand the movie 'The Prestige'.?

Question

Are Christian Bale's characters twins or did he use the machine to create another person. If they're twins than why do they sound so alike and are so identical that their wifes can't tell. Angier said that tesla created the machine for his rival.

Answer 1

The Borden character(s) is a pair of twins. When one lost a finger in the "bullet catch" trick, they chopped the other twin's finger off too.

The Angier trick is harder to understand. This seems to be that in the book it was so silly that the screen writer needed to fuzz it up a bit. In the book, Tesla invented a machine that would actually beam things and people to a different place. The thing in the book was that each operation left behind a kind of dead body called the prestige (look up altrernative definition of prestige in a dictionary). At one moment in the film, Borden prowls backstage during Angier's performance and literally pulls the plug. In the book, this leads to a deterioration of Angier.

This is the significance of the scene at the end of the film where Angier is dying and the camera pans back to show row upon row of water tanks and other magical devices. These have all been somehow duplicated during performances.

The book is a cheap paperback. You can understand better by reading it. It's all a bit silly.

Answer 2

This is a tricky one to answer but here it goes.
Christian Bale has a twin brother, NOT created with the machine, just that a twin brother.
Angier says that Tesla created a machine for Bale as a decoy, towards the end Tesla says he had never created anything for Bale.

Answer 3

He did create his "twin" with the machine. Try reading the book and you'll understand it lots better.