-
Recent releases:
- That They May Face the Rising Sun
- Jericho Ridge
- Civil War
- Mothers' Instinct
- Sweet East, The
- Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire
- Immaculate
- Roaring Twenties, The (reissue)
- Soul
- Dune: part two
- American Star
- Dune: Part 1 (reissue)
- Jerry & Marge Go Large
- Argylle
- Forever Young
- Jackdaw
- All of Us Strangers
- Holdovers, The
- Mean Girls
- Poor Things
Current War, The
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Tom Holland, Tuppence Middleton, Matthew Macfadyen, Katherine Waterston, Damien Molony, Louis Ashbourne Serkis
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Jan Roelfs' production design for this otherwise enervating movie about the battle to provide the world with electricity is worth an Academy Award: it's stunning. Unfortunately, nothing else comes close to matching it, in a film that's as spiritless as an exorcised castle.
Picture is a sleeper all right, but not in a good way, with the director's deadening hand on every frame.
It's the 1880s and, as it becomes evident that electricity is the future, and not gas, when it comes to the question of light, battle lines are soon drawn between Thomas Edison (Cumberbatch), inventor of improvements to Bell's telephone, and former gas magnate George Westinghouse (Shannon).
Edison favours direct current while Westinghouse ploughs on with alternate current, which Edison considers to be perfectly lethal.
As time moves on, poor Edison not only loses his wife (Middleton) to brain disease, but looks like losing the 'current war' as well, notably when the brilliant Nikola Tesla (Hoult) leaves his employ to go to Westinghouse.
All three men are intransigent, obsessed individuals, but their rivalry does not make for riveting entertainment. Performances are solid, but the pace stolid, and the photography as dingy as the early candlelit scenes. Poor title too. At least something like The Electric War would have been a tad more marketable.
David Quinlan
USA 2018. UK Distributor: Film & TV House. Colour by Company 3 (print by Technicolor).
107 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.
Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.
Review date: 22 Jul 2019