The Current War: Director's Cut

Conversations about competing business strategies, which take up a great deal of The Current War, would seem to be a recipe for a dull movie. But the fervor and intelligence Cumberbatch and Shannon bring to their roles make for a gripping experience.

With this “Director’s Cut,” Gomez-Rejon and his editors have saved a witty, well-acted and gorgeous-looking movie and given it the heart, history and intellectual heft it needed to come off.

I never saw the earlier version. This one remains a bit of a mess but a pretty interesting one, as well as one of the few films this year deserving (in both admirable and dissatisfying ways) of the adjective “instructive.”

A stylish portrayal of a literal power struggle based on truly interesting historical figures and events. But it tries to take in too much in too little time, when all it needed was to centre on Edison and Westinghouse.

Any curiosity surrounding the film may have been misplaced – it’s a bit of a bore.

It’s all a lot of effort for very little output, sadly. The Current War has lots of flashy lights and whizzy features, but it remains fatally underpowered.

The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.

I think there is a great movie buried somewhere in here. The script is sharp and has some great lines of Sorkin-esque dialogue, and the performances are solid. As far as historical perilous dramas go, you can do far worse.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

obviously not a bad show. acting is good with so many veterans on board. however, it could not rival the off-key Tesla, by ethan hawke. incidentally i watched both of them at the same time thus the character Tesla whom no one knows much about because of Edison. Tesla was a much better movie because it was so mysterious and the clever use of theatrical magic was indeed refreshing. current war however is a much standard fare and a fail safe mega movie production. It was a good history lesson btw and first time i heard of westington. how ironical history is. Now only Tesla survived to become a behemoth.

I really wanted to like this film. I saw the poor critical reviews, but thought that, being a fan of science, it couldn't be worse than a middling documentary... My takeaway feeling is: how could they have made such an exciting scientific slugout so DULL? And how did I learn NOTHING over the course of 100 minutes. I couldn't figure out what each scene was for, the conflict they were trying to resolve at any given point (other than AC vs DC). Some beautiful scenes. Some earnest effort. Completely wasted opportunity. If you're looking to learn about this "war", I'd bet KhanAcademy would be more dramatic. Definitely more informative.

The actors did an excellent job. The set and camera are perfect, they beautifully evoke that era, almost poetically. Now I come to the negative part that caused me to give this film a low rating, first of all, it is historically extremely inaccurate and biased towards Edison and too much diminishes the importance of Tesla, who is far greater and historically more important than Edison and Westinghouse, especially as a futurist, inventor and electrical engineer. It is a little pathetic that even today there are elitists who cannot forgive Tesla for not being an American from a wealthy family but a poor immigrant. Quite disappointing and it almost seems as if the author of the script did not bother to read more in detail about the events of that time than he based the whole story on one book, Edison's book, in which his arrogance "won".