Current Events

I hadn't heard of the rocky road to release behind the "new" movie The Current War until I'd already decided it looked intriguing enough to see. There's just something like nerd catnip in the idea of dramatizing the development race between alternating and direct current, the clash involving Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. Or, if that's not intriguing enough for you, how about this: Doctor Strange, General Zod, Beast, and Spider-man all fight over science!

Had I known a little more of the history behind the movie, I might have approached with a bit more skepticism. The story reportedly went through more than 60 script drafts over more than a decade, with multiple big names attached to direct and/or star over the years. When it was finally screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, it was panned by the critics. Its release date was then bumped altogether when the sexual accusations against Harvey Weinstein broke and the assets of his company were sold off. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon persevered, convincing the new owners of the film to let him extensively re-edit it... and now, two years later, to finally release it as The Current War: The Director's Cut.

It may well be that this version of the movie is better than the one seen by only a handful two years ago. But it's still not great. For being such a fertile tale of scheming, ambition, and betrayal, there's surprisingly little dramatic tension in it. I think it's because the movie doesn't really offer a message or point of view about any of those grand topics. It's more of a packaging of the events, with very little narrative momentum to it. It occasionally circles the notion of being about asking "how far would you go" to realize a vision. It introduces heady tangential issues like slander, propaganda, and capital punishment. And yet, it somehow fails to do much with them.

Though the cast is full of fine actors, the lackluster script doesn't really give any of them much to do. The performances are perfectly adequate without being flashy or memorable. Benedict Cumberbatch can play this type of dogged, emotionally stunted brainiac in his sleep. Michael Shannon has vindictive, power-mad villain on speed dial. Nicholas Hoult is often a compelling actor, but here seems to be making up for a lack of screen time with an odd accent and overly cultivated behaviors. And Tom Holland seems altogether too young for his role (even though another character explicitly comments on this at one point, hanging a lantern on the issue).

There's something rather dramatically inert about the film... and yet it wouldn't be right to call it boring, exactly. I seldom checked my watch even after realizing I was hardly engrossed in the story. There was an oddly hypnotic quality to it -- a tantalizing promise that maybe more would develop. It never really got "bad" (or "so bad, it's good"), but it never got particularly "good," either.

Ultimately, I feel like I'd have been better served reading a good nonfiction book on this particular topic. This movie, I'd call a C+. Not really a "waste of time," but not a film to seek out, either.