Tesla

Almereyda’s wildly creative Nikola Tesla biopic...defies conventions...

The biopic is an impossible art. You either bore your audience or reduce your subject to a mere collection of ideas and symbols.

It won't spark for everyone but I found it intriguing and unexpected.

To watch Tesla the film is to admire its ambition while regretting its follies. Much like Tesla the man, perhaps?

It's definitely not for everyone, but I liked this so much more than just a by-the-numbers biopic.

Someone as brilliant and creative as Tesla surely deserves a biopic that is not afraid to be unconventional or to swing for the fences, but in practice this just did not work for me at all.

Tesla contains notable storytelling and performances in its imaginative liberties, but this history lesson still fails at electrifying its audience.



So, is Tesla a bad movie? No, you can certainly do worse. Plus, accomplished actors Hawke and MacLachlan carry it across the mediocre finish line. Is it a good movie, though? Definitely not.

The film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.

With its time almost up, Tesla suddenly snaps into sharp emotional focus, and the subsequent epilogue clarified this often-mysterious movie’s agenda—as an emotional way to process aging, failure, missed opportunities and death, much more my speed...