Tesla Parent Guide

The turn of the last century was a wild time for inventors. Two of the best, Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) and Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan), are locked in competition to provide power to the nation: Tesla with an ingenious alternating current (AC) design, Edison with a better-funded direct current (DC) design. The competition soon turns ugly, with Edison spearheading a smear campaign which insinuates that AC is dangerous, eventually persuading the local government to use it in the execution of a convicted murderer. Tesla, on the other hand, has all the brains in the world but no head for business, and soon finds himself struggling financially.

This is probably the most…unique biopic I’ve ever seen. It is heavily stylized, featuring scenes which the narrator readily admits didn’t happen, characters using modern technology, and a score that is certainly from the 21^st century. Whether this works or not is going to vary hugely from person to person.

There are a few things which don’t quite translate for me. Notably, a scene which features Tesla singing, er, mumbling Tears for Fears’ classic “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” which is, in all fairness, a great song. Unfortunately, it feels wildly out of place and it isn’t really justified in the movie. Honestly, if they’d done that over the credits, I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but after this little music video there are still around ten minutes of movie left. It’s just a bit disorienting.

More effective is the occasional glimpse of modern technology – most of which Tesla predicted or tried to develop himself nearly a hundred years before any of it eventually appeared. For me, those peeks into the future further reinforce Tesla’s unusual brilliance and the unfortunate effects that a capricious capital market had on his ingenuity. If the man had a better understanding of the market, and more specifically how investors make decisions, the world might have been a hugely different place.

The content is all fairly mild, and nothing stands out too much. I would recommend this for family viewing but it’s, well…weird. I don’t know how well this would appeal to kids, and I’m not sure I’d want to use something so admittedly ahistorical as an educational tool. On the other hand, it is useful in humanizing historical figures (always a good idea) and giving a complex history a more concrete narrative: one which is, in the broad strokes at least, fairly accurate. That said, it still feels a little like a fever dream – if you aren’t down with watching a biopic while feeling like you’re running an internal temperature of about 105, maybe give this one a miss.