The Current War Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it was definitely dealing with a super interesting story, the movie itself was not really great, I’m afraid. First of all, I thought this movie would be about the conflict between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and, in fact, I have to admit that I had never heard of George Westinghouse before. It’s weird because I saw ‘Tesla’ starring Ethan Hawke less than 2 years ago and I couldn’t remember that he did work for both men. Anyway, in spite of his legendary status, Tesla was never really successful after all but that’s not what this movie was about. However, even though you might expect the whole thing to be a duel between these 2 great men, you still had Tesla who kept popping up with his own narrative and, as a result, this movie always felt rather unbalanced. Another thing that bothered me was the way they tried to conjure some kind of excitement through some slightly annoying score. I mean, the story itself should have been fascinating enough without resorting to such artifice. Another mistake they made was to try to focus as well on the wives of Edison and Westinghouse which was not necessarily a bad idea. Unfortunately, both women had simply not enough impact on the career of their respective husbands so it all felt like a rather useless distraction. At least, the cast was really neat (Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Tom Holland, Matthew Macfadyen, Katherine Waterston), except maybe Tom Holland who was rather unconvincing and probably miscast here. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.