The Current War ★★½

IT’S April 19 and almost a month since the pandemic forced us out of the cinemas.

The last film I saw on the big screen was The Current War which had actually taken nearly two years to get to Australia.

The film was originally released at festivals in 2017 to muted receptions. Mexican-American director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon managed to convince the studio to let him re-cut sections but this took more time than originally thought.

The film was released again but still failed to find popularity. The studio persisted, however, and it was slowly released at different times in regions around the world.

It tells an interesting, true story with interesting historical characters, but just not interesting enough in both cases to make for a compelling screen experience.

It’s the 1880s and Benedict Cumberbatch plays the celebrated inventor Thomas Edison who is in a race with charismatic businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) to be the first providor of mass electricity to the city of Manhattan.

Both men are convinced that their technology (in essence DC versus AC current) is superior and seperately come into contact with young genius upstart Nikolai Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult.

The key performances are strong but Michael Mitnick’s script suffers from constant shifts in the centre of attention between Edison and Westinghouse and a dramatic storyline that ultimately peters out to an unsatisfying ending.

Gomez-Rejon is technically a good director but I’m not sure a staright drama is his genre with every angle in the book being used in a manner that becomes regulkarly distracting.

An interesting, flawed effort to tell a little-known story.