The Current War

The reviews for "The Current War" make me tired.

This is NOT the story of Nikolas Tesla. This is, in fact, an accurate depiction of Westinghouse vs. Edison and the AC vs. direct current. As far as what I've read, the story, though a dramatization, is a decent telling of this.

Reviews here say oh, Tesla got the short end of the stick. Yes, he did, and the movie certainly indicates this. And by taking the focus off of him, one certainly sees that yes, he was an unsung hero. But the story is about Westinghouse and Edison fighting for AC vs. DC. If you want to do a story about Tesla, make your own movie. This is NOT about the invention of the AC. Hello.

Another criticism of this film is that Edison is shown as a victim. I don't know if that was the intention, but if it was, they missed. I certainly didn't think he was a victim. Yes, there was a great tragedy in his life, but he was pretty darned ruthless when it came to trying to destroy Westinghouse. Ruthless and unfair. He was that way in many of his business dealings, including going up against the Lumiere brothers in the invention of motion pictures.

I thought the film was beautifully photographed, I liked the music, and I thought some of the dialogue was very beautiful and emotional, particularly the monologues of Tesla and Edison. The acting was superb. And to me anyway it was evident that Tesla got the shaft big time. Except that's not the story.

I found The Current War fascinating, and it made me want to learn more about all three men.

One thing that's always been true - it's never the person who thinks of an invention or even invents something -- the star of the show is ALWAYS the person who commercializes it.

To criticize a film because it's not what you think it should be about, frankly, is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous - people who get their history from movies instead of using them as steppingstones to learn more about the actual story. Elisha Gray invented the telephone. So did Antonio Meucci. So did Johann Philipp Reis. While we're at it, why don't we do a film about Joseph Swan and John Wellington Starr and their work on the lightbulb before Edison. They probably all deserve movies, but they don't belong in this film, which is the story of Westinghouse versus Edison.

Thought the casting on Cumberbatch's behalf was odd as he doesn't resemble nor act as you would suspect Edison to act (on the uncharacteristic side). Others in the cast seemed right. I've read where people argued the story-line of the movie vs. actual, and I've done a lot of reading on Edison and Tesla and actually found it very close.. plus the AC vs. DC rivalry with Westinghouse (including electrocution) to be VERY accurate. The story doesn't have a lot of "wow" to it (like a fictitious story would), but considering it based on real-life, it felt right. Oddly, the focus seemed to be heavy on Edison, yet the aspect of the story with Edison/Westinghouse truly MAKING AC work (and the person truly on the "shaft end of the stick") was Tesla!! The characterization of Tesla really left a massive untold story of pure genius receiving the most unfair treatment (though touched upon). YES.. Edison DID tell him he'd pay him a huge amount if he could figure out the problem.. and YES.. Edison did say "he was joking" (as in real life). It mentions Edison's venture into film, but if the film makers wanted to tell a more interesting story about Edison, it might be about his film work and competition with the Lumière brothers (the two brothers who actually were the real leaders of motion pictures. There are horror stories of Edison hiring hit men to show up where people were filming with Lumière film equipment to beat them up and destroy the equipment. Edison is portrayed a bit of a victim in this movie, but it seems that he really was anything BUT that. It seems that whoever wrote the screen play or story didn't know enough about Tesla to really portray him as the real victim he was, nor recognize Edison's very underhanded way of sometimes doing things. The film points out (justifiably) that often people credited with inventions are really just the person getting the last development in (not truly the original inventor). I'd LOVE to see Scorsese do a complete story focused on Tesla. THAT'S the REAL story here!

I see here some very offended people among the reviewers who claim that the real story was ignored due to some adversity against the "non-american" inventor Nikola Tesla, who actually invented the AC. They seem to be confused by the fact that the movie doesn't depict the invention of the AC but rather the so call "current war" that took place between two american companies that tried to impose their own vision and business model of how the current should be delivered to the consumer, as DC or as AC. And the two companies involved in this had indeed nothing to do with Nikola Tesla. It is pity that people can't get beyond their obviously biased feelings when it comes to matters of nationality and rather let themselves slip into the the quicksand territory of the conspiracy theories. So, the movie doesn't do injustice at all to anyone it just tells the story as it is supposed to. Go see for yourselves.

Filmed between December 2016 and March 2017, when The Current War debuted in a near-completed form at TIFF in September 2017, it was considered a major contender for the 2018 Academy Awards. Scheduled for a prime awards-season release on December 22, and with a number of heavyweight producers (Timur Bekmambetov, Basil Iwanyk, Harvey Weinstein) and executive producers (Martin Scorsese, Bob Weinstein, Steven Zaillian), the film was to be distributed by The Weinstein Company, with Harvey in particular known for his ruthlessly efficient Oscar campaigns. He was overseeing the assemblage of the final cut in October when he was accused of sexual assault and rape by numerous women, and when he abandoned the project, the November release was shelved. Little more was heard of the film until October 2018, when Lantern Entertainment (which had acquired The Weinstein Company's assets) and 13 Films brokered a deal to co-distribute the film internationally in July 2019. Then, in April of this year, 101 Studios announced they would handle a limited release in North America in October, whilst director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon revealed he had re-edited the film, adding five additional scenes but trimming the overall run time by 10 minutes.

So is it worth the wait? Well, it's competently acted, reasonably entertaining, and moderately informative, but...it definitely won't be involved in the 2020 Oscars. It's certainly not as bad as a lot of critics (most of them reviewing the TIFF cut) have made out, but there's no denying that Gomez-Rejon over-directs the whole thing. If you listen to Paul Haggis's commentary track on Collision (2004) he tells a story about a scene which was filmed to begin with an elaborate camera move via a crane transitioning into a dolly shot. In the final film, however, all of that is gone, and Haggis explains that he realised during the edit that the camera moves were unjustified, doing little but drawing attention to themselves. A lot of The Current War's aesthetic draws attention to itself, primarily because Gomez-Rejon's elaborate direction is so out of sync with Michael Mitnick's by-the-numbers script - like a screenplay intended for Michael Bay ended up being directed by Michael Mann. Although make no mistake, Gomez-Rejon is no Mann.

Telling the story of the "war of the currents", the film opens in New Jersey in 1880 as the pioneer of the long-lasting electric light bulb, Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch proving once again that he can't do an American accent), stages a typically grandiose demonstration of the power of large-scale low-voltage direct current (DC). Meanwhile, George Westinghouse (an characteristically non-psychotic Michael Shannon, the inventor of the railway air brake, begins to consider that the way of the future is in electricity. However, he sees flaws in DC, and so favours high-voltage alternating current (AC), using transformers to step down the voltage. Edison's is the safer of the two systems, but so too is it more expensive, with a limited range compared to AC. The rest of the film takes place over the next 13 years as the two men come into direct conflict in the "race to light America", culminating in 1893 as each attempt to secure the contract for the Chicago World's Fair.

Edison and Westinghouse are opposite examples of the nature of success in an American free-market prospering during a period of immense technological innovation. Edison is aware of and addicted to his celebrity, a visionary enamoured of his own genius, convinced that he and he alone has the mental capacity to achieve success. He's also portrayed as a poor husband and father, and a lousy boss. On the other hand, the more stable, less flamboyant Westinghouse is devoted to his wife, values his collaborators, has no interest in fame, and doesn't even see Edison as competition, believing they should be working together.

The most immediately notable aspect of The Current War, however, is its aesthetic, specifically Gomez-Rejon's direction. Watching the film, I was reminded of Adrian Martin's 1992 article, "Mise-en-scène is dead, or the expressive, the excessive, the technical and the stylish", in which he divides mise-en-scène into three broad categories: classical ("in which there is a definite stylistic restraint at work"), expressive ("general strategies of colour coding, camera viewpoint, sound design and so on enhance or reinforce the general "feel" or meaning of the subject matter"), and mannerist ("performs out of its own trajectories, no longer working unobtrusively at the behest of the fiction"). Whilst I would posit that The Current War lands somewhere between the expressive and mannerist styles, it definitely lies closer to mannerist, rather than the synergy between form and content found in the work of most expressive filmmakers (one of Martin's examples of which is the aforementioned Michael Mann).

Some of Gomez-Rejon's aesthetic choices are definitely justified, arising directly from the content and serving a clear thematic purpose, but a lot are in service of nothing but themselves. An early example of a justified decision is when the camera pans up from Edison's New Jersey demonstration and travels to Westinghouse's Pittsburgh home in what is made to appear a single shot, connecting the two men, not just in terms of geography, but also ideology. Another shot, shooting directly down on Edison's elaborate circular light demonstration, also works well, instantly showing us his ambition and theatricality, plus the effectiveness of the demonstration. Once we reach Pittsburgh, a lengthy single-take shot introduces us to Westinghouse as he weaves his way through a throng of guests at a ball, with virtually everyone trying to catch his attention. This establishes him as a man of influence and considerable reach, but one who abhors the spotlight. In a later scene, Gomez-Rejon shoots Edison and his family in a train carriage using a fisheye lens. With Edison on one seat and his wife and two children facing him, the wide lens distorts the space between them unnaturally, mirroring the important theme of Edison neglecting his family in pursuit of his goals.

On the other hand, some of his choices are extremely hard to rationalise. That this should be important is attested by Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland in their 2002 book, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. During their analysis of Martin's tryptic division, they say of the mannerist style, "style is autonomous, for it is not linked to function, but draws attention to itself. In other words, style is not motivated or justified by the subject matter, but is its own justification". This is as apt a description of large portions of The Current War as you're going to find. The plethora of Dutch angles, for example, are more often than not arbitrary. So too the use of split-screen (even splitting the screen into three at one point). Again though, the purpose of the technique is unclear (compare it with something like Requiem for a Dream (2000), where every use of split-screen is wholly justified). This ripped me out of the film, as I constantly found myself asking, "I wonder why he did that" rather than paying attention to the content.

The handling of the characters is also problematic. Cumberbatch plays Edison as virtually identical to his portrait of Alan Turing in Imitation Game (2014); a brilliant, driven, uncompromising innovator who's as difficult to relate to in terms of humanity as he is easy to admire for mental acumen. Elsewhere, the film has a habit of downplaying the supporting characters. Neither Edison's wife Mary (Tuppence Middleton) nor Westinghouse's wife Marguerite (Katherine Waterston) are developed beyond "supportive wife", whilst Edison's assistant, Samuel Insull (Tom Holland) gets just one decent scene. The worst example of this is, however, is Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), who is very much an afterthought, so under-developed that one wonders if it would have been better to leave him out altogether. This tendency is also found in a postscript which credits Edison, and Edison alone, with the development of the Kinetoscope (one of the first motion picture cameras), without so much as a mention of Louis Le Prince or William Kennedy Dickson.

Nevertheless, as serious as these problems are, I rather enjoyed The Current War, although, granted, that may be because I've always been drawn more to expressive mise-en-scène. It was never going to be the kind of Oscar contender that was obviously intended, but the behind-the-scenes turmoil and the critical mauling are not necessarily indicative of an inherently bad film. Sure, the script is weak in places, and Gomez-Rejon employs every camera trick known to man, more often than not without knowing why. But for all that, it kept me interested, and although I'd never argue it's an especially well-realised historical drama, I did, for the most part, enjoy it.

Contrary to most of the reviews I saw on this title, I actually really enjoyed the film. I generally am not one to watch historical films, but I made an exception for this one.

I found the acting great, as they portrayed their characters and their feelings in a convincing yet not overwhelming manner. I also found the direction beautiful from the beginning to the end of the film (the lamp scene in the first few minutes,the hotel Tesla stayed in and so on).

Something else I need to note, is the fact that they did not try to sugar coat Edison's character and Tesla's naivity and did not portray Westinghouse as the good guy. They gave the oportunity to the viewers to make up their minds for themselves when it comes to whom they support - if the choose to support anyone.

I feel like they did not pay enough attention to a few historical events and skipped a few crucial parts of the story. I wish they actually gave Tesla the recognition he deserved, but I do understand that a film can not possibly fit the entire story without becoming up mundane.

There were moments that the movie started to become a little tiring, which caused me to lose my focus, but they managed to save it by adding some more exciting scenes in between.

In conclusion, I thought it was a good movie, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't really care about the subject. It would be a nice addition to a physics class though, if the teacher is willing and prepared to give some further information on some parts that weren't covered thoroughly or at all.