The Current War (2019)

“The Current War” was not, as I believed upon entering the theater, a Martin Scorsese film.
That didn’t make it anything less than outstanding.

And contrary to the name, it’s not about the current war happening in the Middle East; it was about the war between Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) as they battled over Direct Current and Alternating Current (AC/DC), respectively, and which one should be used to power America.

With my public school education, I was of the understanding that the AC/DC fight was between Edison and Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult). According to the film, Tesla was barely more than a side character to the entire thing.

I should drop in a giant caveat before I go any further: I know next-to-nothing about the actual ‘current war’ of the turn of the century, and this movie started out with a “based on true events” disclaimer, so between my ignorance and their creativity I may have walked out of that theater with a few new, wildly incorrect historical “facts” cinematicaly burned into my brain.

As I pointed out in my review of “The Aviator,” it’s fascinating watching a movie about titans of industry from an era long before I was alive, as those titans no longer exist and aren’t known now for what they wanted to be known for way-back-when. Per the movie, Edison and Westinghouse wanted their names to be attached to the very concept of in-home power, with Edison going as far as stating “‘Edison’ is synonymous with ‘electricity’!”
Meanwhile, in the modern day, we remember Edison as a raging asshole who invented the lightbulb, Tesla as a “misunderstood genius” who’s name is attached to an unrelated car company, and Westinghouse as a Walmart-quality appliance brand for things like TVs and power strips.

The movie did include a lot of little things I’ve picked up over the years, like Edison’s “promise” to Tesla of “make this better and I’ll pay you $50k.”
The version that I’d heard previously was that Edison made it a public challenge, but when Tesla came up with the solution, Edison welched on it and claimed it was “an American joke” that the Serbian-native wouldn’t understand. 
In the movie, Edison hired Tesla and said “if you make this better I’ll pay you $50k, then fire you,” which clearly came across as “don’t show me up or else” - add a language barrier and culture-specific sub-text and it becomes much clearer how Tesla confused the message.
Assuming it actually happened that way.

That may sound like the movie tried to portray Edison as some kind of super genius with a pleasant, human center. It didn’t. While he was indeed a super genius who gave us the tungsten-filament incandescent bulb, the Edison-style bulb (bulbs that screw in to the socket), the gramophone and the kinetoscope (the predecessor to motion pictures), he was also an egotistical jackalope who was willing to stoop to some pretty devious lows to reach his goals, and the movie was quite happy to show that.

Westinghouse, alternatively, followed a very solid moral code. He was, by character development (and a quick google search after the movie) an upstanding man who would rather lose the war than do anything less than honorable in order to win.

Tesla, as the mostly-supporting character, seemed relatively harmless. He joined Westinghouse later in the movie, but his real-life pants-on-head lunacy was completely avoided, instead favoring his eccentricities as some savant-style genius.

Oh, and Edison’s assistant, Samuel Insull (Tom Holland) was there too, to even less effect than Tesla.

The thing that impressed me the most about this movie was the way they did character introductions AND location tags.
For the characters, a simple block of text appeared next to them with their name and a few words describing them; most characters’ names weren’t said out loud until they’d been on screen for a few minutes, so the text was a very smart way to prevent the audience from getting lost.
For locations, it was either ONLY the town or city name (without the state) displayed similarly to the character blurbs, or a location on Edison’s giant wall map was zoomed into before a cut-away to that same place.
It was all very smooth and very clean.

There were two points where a scene showed an item, but with zero context or description - fascinating Easter eggs tied to real-life events. 
Example 1: Edison’s wife Mary died of “congestion of the brain.” While this could have been any number of things, there’s a theory that it was a morphine overdose while she was being treated for another disease. In the flick, a doctor was explaining the congestion to Edison and the camera panned to a bottle of morphine on the nightstand, though the doctor never mentioned it out loud.
Example 2 was related to Edison’s attempts at discrediting AC power by using it to kill animals. While the movie didn’t shy away from showing Edison’s dickery here either, I’ll leave this specific part up to you to watch and catch how the director slid it in. 

Two things I didn’t like: 
First: Edison’s three kids were shown for a lot of the first 15 minutes of the film, as if they were going to turn out to be incredibly important. Then later there were only two kids (with no explanation for what happened to #3) and they had exactly zero relevance to the rest of the story.
Second: The movie started off with people talking about AC and DC currents as if they were discussing the weather: far too fluently, and as if it were the most normal topic on earth. I get it - that’s what the movie was about - but I felt like I was entering midway through someone else’s conversation, instead of getting to be involved from the beginning. I’m not quite sure how they should have solved that, as I don’t like narrative hand-holding, but I’m sure they could have made for a smoother intro to the entire premise.

Back to good things:
The soundtrack was absolutely gorgeous. There were pieces of classical music that we all already recognize, and bits that were made for the movie. Most importantly, none of it felt out of place.
The scenery was beautiful, in such a way that lead to my misidentifying it as a Scorsese film, until the end-credits ran and I saw someone else’s name there.
I also loved that we got to see the origins of things we’re used to today: characters Charles Schwab and J.P. Morgan, the creation of the General Electric company, and the original business model of Westinghouse.
The movie felt very fast-paced, quickly churning through the decade of competition between Westinghouse and Edison, without going so fast as for the audience to feel like we’d missed anything.

Somehow, when I told people I was going to see this, all I ever got were blank looks. 
Were there no ads for it on TV? Or YouTube? Did the studio not shell out a promotion budget?
Considering the cast and the quality, I’m surprised this hasn’t received a lot more attention.
I absolutely recommend this; it’s well worth the 2-hour run time and makes for a very interesting piece of fictionalized historical drama.