In this movie, you will be told what kind of attitude magicians should have and the price and value behind every magic tricks.

After watching a old Chinese magician performance, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) learned that to perfect the art of magic is to dedicate one’s life totally to the art of magic. The old Chinese magician would hide a fish bowl between his legs as he wobbled to-and-fro on stage and made a fish bowl appear on the table as he covered the table top with a piece of cloth. To hide the fact that he was hiding a fish bowl between his legs, he would wobble daily even when he was not performing. This subsequently led Alfred Borden to share his life with his twin brother alternatively as one same person. In that way, the twin would act conveniently as the other person’s double which he used in his act, “the transported man”. In order to protect that secret, he was willing to sacrifice the sanity of his wife as they exchange identities with each other from time to time confusing the wife as she found her husband to love her on a certain day and not love her on another. He went as far as severing the fingers of the twin brother when one of them had lost his fingers.

On the other hand, Rupert Angier would stop at nothing to uncover Alfred’s secrets to his act. He would send his lady assistant who loved him to live with Alfred to steal his secrets as well as spend all his money traveling to meet Tesla (Thomas Edison’s rival as an inventor) to buy his ‘transportation machine’ which turned out to be a ‘cloning machine’. In an earlier scene where Alfred was courting the lady who subsequently became his wife, he performed a coin trick to the lady’s nephew. After his performance, he whispered to the boy, “Never reveal the secret! They will beg you and flatter you for it but as soon as you give it up, you will be nothing to them. The secret impresses no one. The trick you used to fool everyone is everything.”