Tesla

Nikola Tesla is a fascinating figure that’s slowly gained popularity over the years. I feel like most of us grew up hearing about the achievements of Thomas Edison, and held him in high regard. Then one day someone would mention “Tesla” and how he was better than Edison, or undermined by Edison, or at the very least, a brilliant mind that was never able to either gain or keep the resources in order to execute his ideas. His story is one of tragedy if you consider its conclusion, and tragedy should make for a great narrative, especially when the man at its center is an enigma.

Michael Almereyda’s Tesla fucks all that up with a rusty lighting rod…as far as it will go.

Seriously, I think this film short circuited my brain to the point that I now have less knowledge of Nikola Tesla than I did before I sat down to watch it. It’s a discombobulated and dull mess with a go fuck yourself performance from Ethan Hawke that makes Tesla look like a cold-dead fish. I really hated it. I hated the way it was written and shot…and it has terrible lighting. Couldn’t even get the lighting right in a movie about Tesla and Edison.

I’m not going to go into the plot, because I’d rather tell you to go watch the far superior The Current War, which despite being more about Edison, had a greater insight into Tesla than this asshole of a movie. It basically covers the period after Tesla quits Edison’s (Kyle MacLachlan) employment, and tries to make it on his own with investors he needs to impress. He eventually catches the eye of Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), youngest daughter to J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz), who eventually invests in Tesla’s idea to create world-wide communication in an instant. Things don’t go as planned and Tesla sings a karaoke version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, I shit you not.  

The film goes for this “fuck it” approach and has the characters occasionally break the 4th wall, but it never adds anything to the movie, nor does it ever seem to be appropriate. We see a character talk to us while researching Tesla on an Apple laptop, and I don’t know why. There are scenes in this movie that we watch, only for a narrator to tell us that they never happened, and I don’t know why. I already mentioned the karaoke, but it goes worth mentioning again for how embarrassing the scene is. I feel like writer/director Michael Almereyda was going for Nicolas Winding Refn approach, but unlike Bronson, the oddities never fall into place.

Ethan Hawke’s performance occasionally remembers to do something with a word to remind you that Tesla is supposed to have a Serbian accent, but he’s otherwise terrible. I never used to like him as an actor; however, he’s really turned it around in these past years…and now I hate him all over again. Eve Hewson has the right initial approach to her character, but the film never lets her expand on it, and so she feels one-note. Kyle MacLachlan is the only one of the cast that showed up with some electricity.

Seriously, go watch The Current War, or David Bowie in The Prestige , or any fucking thing other than this terrible movie.

Grade: D-