Out of Order Out of Order Cinema

My brother was telling me a funny story about something that happened at the movie theater that he works at. A girl, who was newly trained to run projectors, threaded her first movie. That is, she put all of the reels together and prepared it to be played. All seemed to go well for her. Oh yes, and this film that she threaded was The Prestige.

I loved The Prestige. I really liked it a lot walking out of the movie, but the extra layer of the mixture of the storyline made me love it even more later on. After having a long conversation with my brother the day after we had both seen it, I started to appreciate the depth of the movie so much more. And by the time we were done discussing, we were blown away. It is just an amazing piece of work.

But, for those of you who don't know, The Prestige is told out of order. This is one of the things that makes the story so much more complicated (yet more fun). It's a very jumbled film. Time and narrator shifts around based on the progression of the plot. So if the movie happened to, for some reason, be out of order, it would take a long time for the audience to really realize this.

A week and a half, in fact.

Yes, the new girl threaded the movie out of order. An entire reel was placed too early. This basically means about a fourth of the movie was just in the wrong spot completely. And it took a week and a half for this to be realized. People actually walked out of the movie and understood it, even loved it, and it was not in the right order. I'm not sure whether that means people are just stupid or the movie is that brilliant. Perhaps a bit of both.