by Brian Viner
Benedict Cumberbatch playing electricity titan Thomas Edison could have been a light-bulb moment, but this biopic fails to spark
The Current War (12A) Verdict: Under-powered drama ★★✩✩✩ Horrible Histories: The Movie — Rotten Romans (PG) Verdict: Derivative comedy ★★✩✩✩
Rather like a torch that lights up the way only to flicker and die, the Current War lets its audience down just when we think we’re getting somewhere. even if it were a really good film about the early years of electricity, which it’s not, energy metaphors would be tempting. as it is, they’re irresistible.
the star wattage is certainly impressive: Benedict Cumberbatch plays thomas edison, with Michael Shannon as his great rival George Westinghouse, and decent roles for a further trio of fine British actors, Nicholas hoult, Matthew Macfadyen and tom holland. Unfortunately, alfonso Gomez-rejon’s film, after some early promise, runs out of charge.
Starting in 1880, it tells a worthwhile true story. edison was the eccentrically brilliant inventor, backed by Wall Street banker J.P. Morgan (Macfadyen), who had history’s first and only literal light-bulb moment. he created a bulb that generated light for more than 13 hours, ‘staring at it like it was the baby Jesus playing Mozart’.
he knew it would change the world, and of course it did. here, he tells the taciturn, already fabulously wealthy Morgan that bankrolling his new-fangled system of electricity, based on a direct current, will make him so rich he will look back at this moment ‘and wonder why I was ever so disgustingly poor’.
however, edison’s rival inventor Westinghouse, a hugely rich man himself after devising the locomotive air brake, comes up with a different way of delivering electricity, via an alternating current. the film could just as easily have been called aC/DC, although I suppose cinemas everywhere might have emptied prematurely, with heavy metal fans feeling hoodwinked.
the two men and their fledgling companies then compete over which is to provide power for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, which will effectively mean putting their wares in an extremely well-lit shop window. edison declares that Westinghouse’s system is fundamentally faulty, and tries to undermine him further by pinning the blame on his alternating current for a disastrous inaugural use of the electric chair.
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fights back, encouraged by his powerful wife (Katherine Waterston). eventually, he prevails, not least by shrewdly taking on a third inventor as his partner, an impoverished Serb and former edison employee called Nikola tesla (hoult).
tesla it is who brilliantly works out how to harness the power of Niagara Falls to electrify america’s eastern seaboard. edison, meanwhile, consoles himself by focusing on another invention, the kinetograph, which makes him the true father of motion pictures.
that’s a lot of story to cram into 108 minutes, and Gomez-rejon doesn’t manage it very coherently. Some strands of narrative are left dangling like loose wires. others make only a loose connection with the audience, such as the widowing of edison, who is left heartbroken when his wife (tuppence Middleton) is felled by a brain tumour.
the director, no doubt recognising that the story needs more of a spark, uses some of the tricksy techniques he deployed to make his last picture, 2015’s Me and earl and the Dying Girl, such a quirky delight.
But here the split-screens and wide-angle shots have a faint tang of desperation; I was left with the feeling of having watched a film that was originally intended to be something very different. Sure enough, I then learned that screenwriter Michael Mitnick created the Current War as a stage musical, which flopped.
the movie (shorn of the song-and- dance numbers, mercifully) was first rolled out almost two years ago at the 2017 toronto Film Festival, to lukewarm reviews. Unhelpfully, its producer and distributor was a certain harvey Weinstein, but his subsequent disgrace and his company’s bankruptcy aren’t the only reasons it hasn’t reached cinemas until now.
It also plainly needed re-editing. Seeing it now
makes one wonder what kind of mess it was before.
It’s a shame, really. The rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse is one of America’s great corporate yarns, and it’s not as if there’s nothing filmic about the creation of technology empires: the 2015 movie Steve Jobs was a hit, as was The Social Network (2010), about the founding of Facebook.
Moreover, Cumberbatch has himself elevated the story of a scientist before. He was wonderful as Alan Turing in 2014’ s The Imitation Game.
He’s perfectly good in this, indeed the performances are reliably excellent across the board. But it’s the kind of film that might eventually fare best on DVD. Then we can pay our own tribute to the pioneers of electricity by switching off the telly.
n IT WAS the telly that really popularised Horrible Histories, the children’s books by Terry Deary. They’ve also made it onto the stage and even into video-game form, so a cinematic version was inevitable.
The only question was whether Horrible Histories: The Movie — Rotten Romans, would seem like more than a TV episode stretched well beyond its natural length. It doesn’t.
It also contains a few real treats, none more cherishable than the spectacle, before the opening credits, of Derek Jacobi reprising his greatest screen role as wise, blighted Emperor Claudius.
It won’t mean much to kids, but it’s a joy for anyone who remembers the Seventies TV series I Claudius, as the old boy languishes on his death bed after being fed poisoned mushrooms by his wife Agrippina (Kim Cattrall). Then he throws them up and he’s fine again. He’s even lost his stammer.
But Agrippina has another go, clearing the throne for her delinquent son Nero (Craig Roberts). The story then switches from Rome to distant Britain, where a warrior queen called Boudicca (Kate Nash) is stirring up trouble.
The songs are jaunty, a likeable cast also includes Rupert Graves, Nick Frost, Lee Mack and Alexander Armstrong, and there are lots of predictable gags about Watling Street and ‘woad rage’.
I liked a line about gladiators giving ‘CX per cent’. But there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before, more engagingly, by Monty Python and even the Carry On team.