Recently, a movie scene went viral on Twitter. It depicted the late David Bowie emerging from a concentrated field of lightning and greeting a surprised Hugh Jackman, who needed his help with creating a teleportation machine. It was a great scene that was not only executed seamlessly but properly established that the man David Bowie was portraying was a mysterious, yet brilliant man.
The scene came from Christopher Nolan’s criminally overlooked 2006 film The Prestige, and the man that emerged from the lightning storm was none other than famous inventor Nikola Tesla.
To say that Nikola Tesla was an interesting man would be quite the understatement. After all, he helped create such now-commonplace inventions such as the induction motor. Although he is still a man shrouded in mystery, his legacy lives on in the very inventions he helped create, as well as in electric motor companies and even rock bands.
Because of this legacy, it is not surprising that Tesla is a man that many filmmakers would be interested in analyzing for their films. Films such as The Prestige and The Current War have put him in supporting roles, but surprisingly enough, he has never had his very own movie dissecting his legacy.
Unfortunately, Michael Almereyda’s take on the enigmatic inventor consists of neither style nor substance in his 2020 film Tesla. The film is a baffling mess of poorly-written characters, Drunk History-inspired references, and horrible attempts at quirky humor that will have the audience rolling their eyes rather than laughing.
Almereyda’s other works, Hamlet (2000) and Cymbeline (2014), are known for their uncanny settings, so it should come as no surprise that Tesla follows suit in this inclusion. However, unlike his version of Hamlet, it simply does not work. The still, stock photo, transition shots and lower third transition cards that look straight out of Windows Movie Maker are jarring, to say the least. While this could be meant to symbolize Tesla’s (Ethan Hawke) disconnection from the rest of society, it mainly just looks cheap and lazy.
During some parts of the movie, the audience is supposed to believe that popular French theatre actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) is performing in front of a large crowd, yet you never see the crowd or anyone ever watching her performance. Instead, you only hear standard audience cheering that one could only assume Almereyda got off of a stock sound effects website.
Speaking of performances, the cast is certainly trying their best to salvage the mediocre script that they are given. Ethan Hawke, in particular, stands out as Nikola Tesla, giving a quiet performance that is perfect for such a mysterious figure as the inventor. His body language is what truly sets him apart from the rest of the cast as his constant feelings of nervousness and alienation are visible in even the slightest of body slouches or hand fidgeting.
Unfortunately for Hawke, he is not exactly helped by any of his co-stars. The usually-incredible Kyle MacLachlan phones it in as the infamous Thomas Edison — both figuratively and, in one bizarre instance of the movie’s insistence on being quirky and unique, literally. The rest of the cast gives about the same energy towards their performances as an underfunded high school theatre troupe; wanting to work with what they have, but ultimately falling short because their characters are so poorly written and one-dimensional.
The worst sin that Tesla commits, however, is the fact that you cannot even recommend it as a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. The parts that leave you scratching your head only do so because the rest of the film is just so slow and boring that any scene that tries (and fails) to be humorous seemingly comes out of nowhere. The shock of these scenes relies entirely on the fact that they are so sudden that you, as the audience, have no time to react before it transitions to the next boring scene. Seeing Hawke serenading us with a cover of Tears for Fear’s absolute classic “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” or watching MacLachlan take out an iPhone in what is supposed to be 1899 is not worth it for the slowly-paced events that lead up to such bizarre scenes.
At the end of the day, if you want to watch a Nikola Tesla biopic, just watch The Prestige again, if not for the fact that David Bowie enters the movie emerging from a lightning storm.
