Tesla

American biographical drama film written and directed by Michael Almereyda

Biography Drama History
102 min     5.848     2020     USA

Overview

Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) is a brilliant scientist who emigrated to America from poor Eastern Europe. He works at the plant of the great inventor Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan). However, the latter does not really appreciate an outstanding engineer and even completely denies the importance of discovering alternating current, the possibilities of which excite Tesla so much. As a result, the scientist leaves and goes rogue, which, of course, will not be easy at all.

Nikola Tesla is a person whose life is very difficult to integrate into an academic biopic format. He is no longer just a great physicist and engineer, he is also a myth, an obsession, a mysterious name from textbooks, around which conspiracy theories and all kinds of legends are formed all the time. It is not surprising that it is more natural for this character to be a fantastic subject in art.

The story told in Tesla is well known to those interested in technology. The main events of this movie unfold during the War of Currents, the famous confrontation between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison, marked by a very dirty struggle of competitors and mutual dislike of inventors for each other. But in his work, Michael Almereyda actually wants to show not the known events and facts from Tesla's biography, but the scientist's alienation from the whole world, his intertemporal and otherworldly state. Hence the objects that appear at the end of the 19th century from the beginning of the 21st, a little theatrical scenery that separates Tesla from other people, leaving him alone on the stage.

Tesla is a very unusual film that not everyone will like. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison have an ice-cream battle here, Niagara Falls displays a banner with a printed picture, the narrative is sometimes interrupted by a slideshow with off-screen commentary, and Edison pulls a smartphone out of his pocket when you least expect this. But all this, including Tesla's final performance of the song “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by rock band Tears for Fears, follows one goal: to show the genius inventor as a person living ahead of his time. Such an approach to biographical drama will alienate someone, but some might find it worthy of attention.

Reviews

tmdb28039023 wrote:
According to this movie, Thomas Edison (MacLachlan) and Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) were like Mozart and Salieri if Mozart and Salieri had been anything like they are portrayed in Amadeus – but then Tesla has as tenuous a hold on reality as Amadeus does, sans all the things that make Milos Forman's film otherwise great. This movie derives a sick pleasure from comparing the two inventors, emphasizing Edison's failures over Tesla's successes – whatever those may have been; I confess that, after seeing the film, I haven't the slightest idea of Tesla's achievements, apart from alternating current (which he did not invent) and, apparently, communicating with Mars. Perhaps it's due to the latter that Hawke plays Tesla as some kind of alien; a combination of Keanu in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tesla depicts two meetings between the inventors only to admit that neither actually happened. In one of those imaginary encounters, Edison apologizes to Tesla and tells him that he was wrong about him. What is the point of this? If it is supposed to be a retroactive 'f-you' to Edison, methinks he is long past the point of caring. Apart from the historically revisionist chip on its shoulder, Tesla is a stylistic disaster. The film is narrated by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), American financier and banker J.P. Morgan's (Donnie Keshawarz) daughter. In addition to her role in the events of the film, Anne appears in cutaways, sitting at a table with a Mac computer (?), reporting the respective number of results in a Google search for Tesla and Edison, and telling us to Google the American businessman and engineer George Westinghouse. If this weren't strange enough, in the second half of the movie director/screenwriter Michael Almereyda has Hawke stand against a background that is either a matte painting (Niagara Falls, a field in Colorado, a restaurant) or a projection (a pair of horses frolicking in a meadow, to whom Hawke offers an apple); this might work in a stage play, or if the entire film consistently followed the same aesthetic, but here it's just another incomprehensible artistic choice. All of the above, however, is nothing compared to what will go down in history as arguably the lowest point in cinema in the year 2020; Ethan Hawke as Nikola Tesla doing a karaoke version of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." This is the exact moment, with about ten minutes to go, when I said "F this movie" and never looked back.

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