- Starring
- Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Kyle MacLachlan
- Writer
- Michael Almereyda
- Director
- Michael Almereyda
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 96 minutes
- Release Date
- n/a
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
Let’s just get this out of the way right now, Tesla is not a good film at all and it’s simply baffling as to why that would be the case. Plagued by a low budget (it showed) and one bad choice after another, this film is simply a hot mess that should not exist in this form. The character of Tesla’s last appearance in a film was in 2019’s The Current War but in this film, he takes center stage in something that plays like a high school production of a Wikipedia article for Tesla which was as exciting as that sounds. One of the main problems with the film was its incessant need to be hip and current instead of telling a straightforward story which will only annoy audiences and makes the film come off as pretentious.
Perhaps the purpose of all these unnecessary stylistic choices was to distract from Tesla‘s incredibly dull story that follows a young Nikola Tesla (Hawke) as a young man as he attempted to bring his own electrical system into prominence in the United States, an industrialist country that worked a lot different than how he was accustomed to, while also competing with fellow inventor Thomas Edison (MacLachlan). Not much would happen over the course of its 90+ minute running time but it will certainly feel longer. Told by an associate of Tesla’s named Anne Morgan (Hewson), expect a few creative liberties (and WTF moments) with the story and plenty of fourth-wall breaking because why not?
Seeing that Tesla is already bad on multiple levels, why not have a terrible script? Not only is the cheesy dialog painful to watch, the sleepwalking across the board was frustrating, especially from Hawke and his monotone delivery as Tesla.
At the end of the day, as nobody cared during the making of Tesla, why should we? Avoid this dumpster fire at all costs.
*still courtesy of Sundance*
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.