I.S.S.

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

"Houston...YOU'VE Got a Problem!"

or

Chekhov's Environmental Control System

I.S.S., of course, stands for International Space Station, that dragonfly-like polyglot of modules—Soviet and American—that were first launched into space in 1998 for construction and was first occupied by people in November 2000. It has been circling up there for 24 years, perpetually crewed—273 individuals from 21 countries—performing observations and doing micro-gravity experiments in "astrobiology, astronomy, physical sciences, materials science, space weather, meteorology, and human research, including space medicine and the life sciences" (according to its Wikipedia page). The darned thing even has a blog. Several documentaries and one fictional film have even been shot in it (I'm sure it's streaming "somewhere"). Five space agencies are involved: Russian, American, Japanese, European, and Canadian all getting along just fine circling the Earth perpetually, quite separate from life on Earth, which has struggled to survive with changing global conditions, wars—civil and not, famine, disease (at times reaching global pandemic levels), changes of governments and coastlines, earthquakes, volcanoes, and an increasing experimenting with autocracy and xenophobia, despite the fact that everyone came from somewhere and migration has been going on for a very long time. Space may be a hostile environment, but it seems positively utopian next to the pale blue dot its circling.

The new movie by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, I.S.S., tries to be as many things as the station, itself. A thriller (paranoid variety), a bottle movie, a "what if?" scenario, a cautionary tale, and a sociological statement of sorts. It pretty much "screws the pooch" (as the astronauts say) on every level, although it does try hard. But, "trying hard" usually just means your booster's going to explode on the pad.

It's the first time up in space for former Marine and NASA astronaut Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose—I like her), who is traveling to the ISS for an extended time and she's being counseled by her pilot Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.)—because evidently they don't have training anymore for astronauts. The trip is quick in movie-terms—she gets launched and, all of a sudden, the station is out the window. She advises that the Russians traditionally knock three times before opening the hatch, and this is the one instance where the information they give you doesn't telegraph something's going to happen later in the movie, because they never do it again.

She meets the astro- and cosmo-nauts already there: Commander Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina), Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova), Nicholai Pulov (Costa Ronin), and Alexey Pulov (Pilou Asbæk). Everybody gets along perfectly fine; Barrett and Vetrov, more than fine, as it's floating around that they're sharing equipment (wink, wink). The veterans show Dr. Foster the ropes—and, apparently, the wires that make everything look like they're in a micro-gravity environment. If one is being charitable, one could say that everybody tries very hard to create the illusion, gently swaying as if they're on a boat in gently-choppy waves, but once one gets used to the fact that everybody looks like there's gravity weighing them down, you just go with it, because there are other issues on board that command greater attention.

Like learning where "the cupola" is. That's the part of the station that provides a lovely panoramic view of the Earth (and is, apparently one of the most popular places on the real space station). Oh, and did anybody mention the station has an "altitude problem" where the station is getting low enough in orbit that the atmospheric drag will start decaying their trajectory around the Earth enough that the whole thing is going to start flaming back down to Earth. Somebody should look into that. Oh, well...let's wait to hear from the ground about it before we do something.* It's a long mission...what's your hurry?

The answer comes soon enough. Foster is Earth-gazing one day and sees a flash just off the Yucatan peninsula. Then, another. Then, more. The flashes starting to spread. "Hey guys? Could you come here please?" she yells back to the crew. They look in horror as the flashes start to spread...and there's no explanation from Earth. All contact with Mission Control, Russian or American, has gone dead.**

Well, that ain't good. The Russian and American teams hover over their radios sending out hails, but nothing's coming back (Hey, I've got an idea...how about firing your boosters and pushing yourselves higher in orbit, so you don't go crashing and burning back down to Earth...ya know, just to give yourselves something to do to pass the time....yeah, no, they don't do that.) Both crews speculate idly, wonder what could happen, and stop talking to each other. Because if their communications systems are dead, why not stop talking at all? Things and people get suspicious and just a little paranoid while awaiting word from Mother Earth.

And, of course, things don't get better. What they get from Mission Control is short and terse: "An act of war has occurred between U.S. and Soviet militaries. All Americans abort all orders and experiments. Priority is to take over I.S.S...by any means necessary." And the Soviets are behaving oddly. They have a problem with their communications antenna—frankly, at that point, who doesn't—and it will require a space-walk to fix it. Barrett volunteers. Nobody else does. But, he decides to go anyway. "Massive lack of protocol," Foster tells him. But, he goes, anyway.

By this point, I had given up. I went to see I.S.S. because I'm a space-nerd. And, it's an interesting premise—what if you're in space and everything goes to shit back on Earth? George Clooney made an interesting, haunting version of this with The Midnight Sky. But, I.S.S. has no such ambitions. It's a ship of recycled parts—The Thing (but without "The Thing"), Alien (but without the Alien), and Solaris for the psychological elements of the paranoia, isolation, and conflict that close quarters can produce in humans. But, that's about it. It's an interesting premise—what do you do when you're the survivors of a war but your continued survival is limited? It's the space-age version of a refugee situation. Do you start fresh, or retain your memories and your grudges and try to regain the past? Interesting questions.

None of which are even approached by I.S.S. It takes the stupid route—let the actions be decided by the blindly militant or the short-sighted paranoids. War breaks out on the space station and any negotiation is disrupted by one of those two types. One might as well be back on Earth if they're going to take that route. There's no forward thinking (as one expects in speculative fiction) only the backwards thinking that produces wars in the first place. Thanks, but I can see that at home.

Still, there were a couple of moments that provoked something approaching interest. At one point, during his space-walk, the commander unbuckles his life-line because he can't reach his next hand-hold and I audibly sneered "you idiot!" (it's okay, I was the only one in the theater), knowing full well that any script that would have something that stupid happen would follow it up with said idiot being bumped off the station. No spoiler alert necessary; the whole movie is a spoiler alert.

But, this is how bad it got, and how low the bar became. At some later point, there is some tension about a knife in the kitchen. And the paranoid character slams the knife petulantly onto the kitchen table-top. Where it LAYS there (in micro-gravity, remember). It doesn't float. It lays there. And I gave the movie-props (what little I could) for not giving us an insert shot displaying some label like "MAGNO-KNIFE©" to explain why it's not floating around in zero-g. That's doing some complicated mental charity that the movie doesn't deserve, but at that point I was desperate to come up with anything good to think about the thing.

 

It's that bad.

They won't be showing I.S.S. on "movie night" aboard the real I.S.S.

Evidently, things get a bit sullen when the Russians are "the bad guys" in the movies. 

(Actually, given the quality of I.S.S., they should consider themselves lucky)

* Um. To put it simply...why? Why wait? The booster rockets they need to get them higher in orbit...are ON THE SPACE STATION. They can't do it themselves? Sure, it's always best to check with Mom and Dad back on Earth, but...if it's an issue, why not DO something about it? "He who hesitates" and all that.

 

** I've talked about the micro-g simulation attempts, but how are the other special effects? Depending on the shot—and there are several crews involved—they can be quite lovely, or Marooned-level terrible. It was actually surprising the discrepancies from shot to shot. The budget, by the way, was comparatively miniscule—$13.8 million (which is about what Star Wars cost in 1977). Godzilla Minus One has a budget just below $15 million.

Air

If the Icon Fits (Based on a True Shoe)

or

Crossing That Ol' River Jordan

"Who wants to see a movie about a shoe?" cracked the guy taking his kids to see Super Mario Bros.

 

Parenting kills irony.

Air does seem to have an odd subject for a movie—the efforts by "footwear manufacturing company" Nike to obtain the endorsement of up-and-coming rookie Michael Jordan for their struggling basketball division ("We're a jogging company! Black people don't jog!") doesn't seem to be movie material. A documentary on ESPN, maybe.

 

But, the script for the film had shown up on that gold-mine of movie ideas, "The Black List"*, and its author Alex Convery** did, indeed, craft a smart, ironic, compelling film about something "that changed everything." And not just Nike's fortunes, but also a long-standing deficiency in how athletes were compensated for their exploitation. Maybe you don't give a rip about the fortunes of millionaires (I hear you), but it's something that is making its way down to amateur sports and the inequality of parity in women's sports. It is a big deal. And it started here, with the unlikeliest company—who were just the ones to think outside of the foot-print.

Meet Sonny Vaccaro (a rather doughy Matt Damon), an executive at Nike's basketball division (which, unfortunately is having a tough "go" at it, losing money, and there's been a lay-off of its employees recently). He's a go-getter, a gambler, and a pal of Nike's idiosyncratic CEO Phil Knight (Air director Ben Affleck), whose zen-Buddhist way of running things is often contradictory and sometimes unfathomable. But, there's something about Sonny that Knight finds valuable, even if he finds him frequently frustrating in how he gets along with his fellow employees.

 

Like now, for instance. The basketball sneaker division has a budget of $25k to sign a scrimmage of the new drafted NBA players to endorse their product—which is running third in reputation and sales to Adidas and Converse. At a board meeting, Nike marketing director Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) chairs a meeting to determine who of the "rooks" they'll approach, and the pickings are slim. They're, at least, uninspiring. They're certainly uninspiring to Vaccaro, who does not mince words that the choices are not ones that will inspire sales and product loyalty. He has one guy in mind—this new kid, Michael Jordan. But, he's told to forget it, they can't get him. He's too expensive and he wears Adidas on the court. Don't go chasing a dream. And, especially, don't put all the budgeted eggs in one basketball player.

But, Sonny Vaccaro doesn't listen. He tells anybody in ear-shot of his harangues (even if they're rolling their eyes) that "Jordan" is the one they should get—for the whole budget—despite all the hurdles: Jordan's agent—played brilliantly by Chris Messina; Jordan's own hesitance, overseen by the protective Jordan family, mother Deloris (Viola Davis) and father James (Julius Tennon—for those people sensitive to "nepo-babies," he's Viola Davis' husband/business partner); the corporate mind-set of Nike in general and Knight, in particular—when times are tough is not the best time to go for broke; and the general consensus that it can't be done (so why try?)

All of which just makes Vaccaro work harder for it. He's not an athlete, but he's dogged, like one. He does his due diligence, talks to people who coached Michael, talks to his agent (for all the good it does), then starts breaking industry "rules" knowing full well that if he fails and Jordan doesn't sign it's business for Nike as usual...which is not good, and his job is probably on the line. But, he's of the mindset that if he can't sign Jordan, he probably shouldn't be there, anyway. It's a three-point shot at the buzzer.

First things first: go see it. It's brilliant (despite being "a movie about a shoe"). And you don't need to be a sports fan to appreciate it (although it might help). Like the brilliant Moneyball, it is a story steeped in the arcana of the sport, which is all throw-away stuff in the end, because it's about something else...something more primal and more important. And it's a movie that you can appreciate for the sheer mastery of the craft of good story-telling.

The script—by Convery***—has crackling dialog that bears repeating outside the theater, and it's smart about showing people, warts and and all, but not caring one jot. It already assumes that the people of the story have feet of clay and doesn't try to portray them as anything but ordinary people in an extraordinary moment in time.

And Affleck's direction is his most assured. His strength as a film-maker is montage and he begins Air with a deep-dive into 1980's culture, combining archive footage with his establishing shots (also steeped in 1980's culture, just to keep the through-line) of life at Nike, Inc. Plus, he's a disciplined editor, who uses the "cut" as an accelerant for scenes that are already delivered at Hawksian speed.

He's helped by the legendary photographer Robert Richardson (Criminy, he even made Portland look beautiful!), who is less eclectic than he has been in the past, but offers work that could earn him a "co-director" credit. In one scene where Vaccaro talks to coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) in a dimly-lit bar, it's done in a couple of long-held "takes" with the camera constantly snapping focus between the two participants, directing your attention. That it's done with such brio, without trying to disguise it, tickled me.

And in another little creative touch, the movie isn't scored, but its soundtrack is  scavenged from 80's scores by Tangerine Dream and Harold Faltermeyer, when there isn't an period rock tune under-laying the action.

It is a great show. One quibble that I know people have been talking about is that the film doesn't really show Michael Jordan (and, in fact, goes out of its way NOT to show him)—there is one line spoken by "him" (and that's over the phone) in the entire movie—but, that conceit is in the Convery script. Leave "the man" out of it. We're talking about potential. And Affleck and Damon's rewrites push the concept of not portraying him all the way.**** They might have extended it to the title, as well. Convery titled his script "Air Jordan". For months in development, it was known as "The Untitled Matt Damon-Ben Affleck Project." It hits theaters as Air. Simply Air. No Jordan. Not even in the title.

 

But, he's there...in archive footage.The "real" Michael Jordan. All the while, they're making a movie looking at a Master from the vantage point of the future. We know what he did. We know the story. All of it. And they show it in flashes in the best part of the movie. But, we're talking about portraying a time before all that happened, when they're talking about potential...and betting on a future. A future they can't even conceive of.

A future nobody could conceive of in their wildest dreams. 

 

Except, maybe, for Michael Jordan's.

* It was picked "the best un-produced screenplay of 2021".

 

**  It should be noted—even if the WGA doesn't—that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck did an extensive re-write. But, what makes the Convery script so good is still in there. And the good lines, too.

 

*** Convery's script is there, but Damon and Affleck did an extensive re-write, adding one person—Howard White (played brilliantly by Chris Tucker), who heads Jordan Brand now. His character seems essential to the story now. Dam-fleck also eliminated the character of the brilliant Tinker Hatfield, giving the dialog to Creative Director Peter Moore (Matthew Maher, who is terrific). Too many designers, I guess, would have confused people.

 

**** I amuse myself with the idea that it's along the same lines as not portraying Mohammad...or the way clerics worried about the "sacrilegious" idea of showing The God-head" on movie screens. Here, they're respectfully not showing The GOAT. 

Free Guy

BFD for the NPC

or

Thumb-Twitching at the Movies

 

Guy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up every morning, feeds his fish ("Good morning, Goldie!"), pulls out his usual outfit—short-sleeved blue shirt, khakis—from a closet full of short-sleeved blue shirts and khakis, brushes his teeth, eats breakfasts, grabs a coffee (medium coffee, cream, two sugars) and goes to his job as a bank teller ("Don't have a good day. Have a great day!")...which will be robbed...every day. Without fail.

 

Oh, I didn't mention the commute.

 

Guy lives in Free City, which is a video-game. Walking to work, he is constantly witness to all sorts of disasters, natural and unnatural, none of which can kill him if he's on his normal route to the bank. He is an NPC—a non-playing character, an extra, a background figure. He's coded, but he's robotic. Unless something hits him and kills him, he's going to do the same thing, go the same route, be the same Guy, a nobody, a drone, a cog, a non-essential worker.

And I know how he feels.

Guy's a part of the landscape, but Free City is constantly invaded by the muckery inflicted by real-world players, all represented by avatars wearing sunglasses. The chaos they cause is just part of the routine, until Guy notices a woman (Jodie Comer) walking down the street, bopping to the Mariah Carey song "Fantasy" which he recognizes. Why, you may ask? Well, that would be spoilery (and, frankly, a little unbelievable—but, go with it). He's intrigued by her, wants to know who she is, and inspires him to don player sun-glasses he's acquired from one of the bank-heist perps.

What he finds is a real-player's perspective of his world—pixelated mind blown! He is made aware of an entirely new world in which he is not merely a part, but could become a participant; he has some measure of control and he knows that the woman—named "Molotovgirl"—is somehow involved. So, he must find her, and find out what he needs to know to become the master of his own fate.

Tough work. But, the cast—especially in the Free City sections—makes it enjoyable. Because that whole area is a fantasy and anything can happen (including cameos) there are surprises and Easter eggs galore, plus it has Ryan Reynolds at his most winsome. The movie is more of a slog out in the real world where the issues are creative rights over code rather than self-actualization, and despite the best efforts of these actors—Taika Waititi tries damned hard for laughs and Comer's real-life programmer Millie has less jolt than Molotovgirl—these sections of the film must be endured, rather than enjoyed.

Of course, you've seen it before...and better. The "Simulation Hypothesis" has been around since people decided they liked their dreams better than being awake. The trope was used in a lot of "Twilight Zone's" and other sci-fi/fantasy product like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, the "Men in Black" series, The Matrix (of course) and Ready Player One. One of my favorite instances was in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"—"Ship in a Bottle"—where, after trapping a hologram of Professor Moriarty in a small cube version of a holo-suite, Captain Picard muses "Who knows? Our reality may be very much like theirs, and all this might just be an elaborate simulation, running inside a little device sitting on someone's table." 

 

Just so.

The concept is so fascinating that real-world people can abandon their limited lives to immerse themselves in the video-worlds to imagine themselves as better versions (in the things they admire—like kill-ratios) while their biological clock is ticking down, all in the quest of earning more imaginary lives. Video games are the crypto-currency in our biological banking system. But, do they value their psuedo-lives more? Than their actual lives? Results may vary.  I sense a screenplay synopsis coming on.

For me, I don't play video games anymore. I find them a waste of my dwindling time here on Earth. So, I didn't "geek" over Free Guy, a lot of the inside referenced going right over my head. But, I enjoyed enough of it that I didn't care—and the movie plays well enough without insider knowledge. I also liked the fact that I got to watch it on free HBO while staying in a hotel in Oregon, a way to pass the time where I didn't "want those two hours of my life back"—real or virtually.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The Insufferable Height of Perpetual Narcissism

or 

Putting the "Meh" Back in "Meta"
 

I like "meta" in movies, when the Hollywood fantasy machine suddenly turns transparent, and something walks into frame that reminds you that "it's just a movie." The painted back-drop rolls out of frame to show the less-than-inspiring back-lot and makes the point that everything is calculated to make you believe in the situation portrayed and not that everything is "designed" to reinforce the falsehood. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" shouts Oz. Or the gaffer. Or the boom-operator. Or the perpetual green-screen. We want you to see what we want you to see. 

 

As Johnny Carson once joked "I can't believe 'Survivor' because I know that just off-camera there's a camera-grip eating a cruller."

 

But, it's a nice little joke to sometimes see the cruller. To see reality sneak in and wink. Like all the celebrity cameos in The Player. Like Julia Roberts (playing Tess Ocean in Oceans Twelve) trying to pretend to be movie-star Julia Roberts to pull off a scam (until Bruce Willis shows up and wonders why she can't remember their kids' play-dates).* Or when John Malkovich plays himself—or an actor named John Malkovich—in Being John Malkovich. Or, as in another Charlie Kaufman-penned screenplay, Adaptation., which is about the struggles of a screenplay-writer trying to write an "unfilmable" movie. Which starred Nicolas Cage.

Tom Gormicon's film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is one shallow dive into the madness of the "meta"-verse while being a love-letter to the star appeal of Nicolas Cage, its star. The film is plastered and puttied with references and clips of past Cage films and roles as it builds up the character of Nick Cage—not Nicolas, notice—an actor of many iconic roles, beloved by a fan-base, but struggling with finding parts to pay off his massive debts, stemming from a recent (fictional, mind you) divorce.**

The problem is that "Nick"—fictional Nick—is an actor of intense sensibilities who has a tendency to go "all in" in his roles and that can be discouraging to directors who are looking for stable and not mercurial. Nick is a star ("of course, I don't have to do a 'read'") but hovering below the A-list ("Of COURSE, I'll do a 'read'!"), who has had a good run but now is in the doldrums of his career, discouraged by all the film-makers wanting "to go another direction." For a self-involved narcissist like Nick, this is a situation he cannot process and he endlessly obsesses over the unfathomable consideration that he might not be in demand. In another Cage-career reference, he debates with an Adaption.-like twin of his former self, Nicky (Nicolas Kim Coppola, Cage's birth name), who has all the insufferable grand-standing of...young Nicolas Cage. Nicky wants Nick to remember that he's not an actor, he's a *STAR* and the id/ego clashes between the two are the best parts of the movie (and though my view of the film is marginal, kudo's to real-life actor Nicolas Cage for being so brutally satiric in doing a brilliant imitation of himself!)

With a sizable hotel bill mounting up and no prospects, he decides to take an offer from his agent, Richard Fink (Neil Patrick Harris) to appear at a millionaire's birthday party for a sizable fee, despite his artistic ambivalence to the idea ("I'm not a trained seal!"). The millionaire is Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal, at his puppy-dog best), who has made his fortune in olive oil (sounds familiar...), but under surveillance by the CIA in the form of agents Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz who suspect Javi of being a drug kingpin and the mastermind behind the kidnapping of a local politician's daughter.

Javi is, in fact, a massive fan of Cage's—maybe more so than Cage, himself) and, after some initial truculence on the actor's part, they bond over movies ("Paddington 2—it made me want to be a better man"), their mutual love for Nick Cage, and the possibility to collaborate on a screenplay. But, soon, Nick is in conflict as he's approached by the CIA agents to help their kidnapping investigation by being their inside man at Javi's compound, a task that he's thoroughly incapable of handling. No amount of "nouveau shamanic" acting can prepare him for "spy-craft, subterfuge, what-have-you."

The first blush of the movie and its premise is enjoyable, sometimes even brave, but pretty soon the movie is too meta for it's own good—especially when it starts to follow the two main characters' screenplay breakdown of "character driven opening—typical Hollywood blockbuster—we need to clear our heads and work on the third act." Boy-Howdy! That third act consists of a deliberately (but not amusingly) clumsy action chase that culminates in Cage suddenly proving competent—at gun-point—even while suffering from a vicious knife wound in his leg. What starts out as a mildly interesting little satire of narcissism and fan adulation finally succumbs to a by-the-numbers plot that would only energize a rom-com...or the vehicle for a flavor of the month comedic actor graduating from television.

Oh, the potential was there. And every once in a while there's a glimmer that either the writers or the director were waking up to the idea that this could lead up to something interesting...but the movie finally succumbs to formula and wasted potential, like an actor "settling" for a project, finally showing that it doesn't even have the courage to have anything less than an "everybody's happy" ending. Paddington 2 took more chances. You think massive talent has unbearable weight, consider that there's no heavier burden than a great potential.

One has to review the movie that's there, though, not its possibilities or its potential, so leave any worthless suggestions in the "might've been" section of the blog (there isn't one). But, one story intrigues me—that Nicolas Cage (the real one) liked the script but kept turning it down, and once he agreed, really wanted to play the "Javi" part.

 

Another reason that Nicolas Cage should keep working.

* On television, two of the best "meta" shows were "It's Gary Shandling Show" where Gary Shandling played himself in a sit-com or the blisteringly satirical high-wire act of "The Colbert Report" where Stephen Colbert played a windy blow-hard news reporter named Stephen Colbert.

 

 ** Cage in real life is in his fifth marriage. The ex-wife he's talking about in the movie is a fictional make-up artist he met while making Captain Corelli's Madolin, which is a real movie Cage made in 2001. Yeah, I know, it's confusing, but just keep in mind that the real-life Nicolas Cage is playing a fictional actor named Nick Cage, who looks, sounds and acts like Nicolas Cage and starred in all of Nicolas Cage's films. Got it?

The Current War: Director's Cut

Written (really) at the time of the film's eventual release.

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

AC/DC
or
Bringing It All to Light

The Current War was produced in 2017 and finally released—to theaters—in late 2019 (after premiering with a different cut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2017). The script had been acquired by The Weinstein Company (after appearing on the legendary store-house of interesting but unproduced screenplays "The Blacklist"), and filmed, executive produced by Martin Scorsese and Steve Zaillian. 

Then, people finally paid attention to Harvey Weinstein's behavior, and the film, which had a lukewarm reception at the festival, was shelved and sold in the midst of TWC's implosion. Pulling strings with his final cut contract, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon ordered re-shoots and did some trimming before the film was finally released to theaters in 2019.

In what might be called its thesis statement, the film begins with top-hatted businessmen walking in the dark through the woods to a clearing, at which point they are blinded by a circle of light that appears magically before them, composed of many singular light bulbs piercing the darkness. From the center of the array walks Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who greets them with "I hope you brought your check-books." He'll need it. For Edison's plan isn't merely the use of light-bulbs, but the invention of something that no one has heard of—the electrical grid. Edison's Big Idea is to create a network of generators—that he'll own—generating direct current to cities and neighborhoods. But, given DC's limited range he's going to have to make a lot of them.

There's money to be made. And where there's money to be made, there is competition. George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) wants to partner with Edison, but when his overtures are rebuffed, Westinghouse decides to find an alternate system. Alternating Current will travel over greater distances and given its on-again/off-again transmission could be safer and probably cheaper. The two go head-to-head trying to convince local governments to flip the switch, but they're reluctant with two systems in competition.

With the arrival of Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) to his employ, Edison thinks he might have an inside track, but Tesla is a mercurial sort and soon bridles at Edison's single-mindedness and leaves, feeling his work is being ignored. He tries to develop his own system, but eventually joins forces with Westinghouse, who has taken his battle to the public.

As every politician knows, the best way to persuade people is with fear. Westinghouse starts a smear campaign claiming that DC is dangerous and should not be allowed in homes. Edison starts to say the same thing about AC and, to prove his point, submits a proposal for a method of execution that is far more humane—the electric chair (despite professing that he would never be a part of weapon development or something destructive to mankind).  When the first use of it sets the prisoner on fire, his reputation is damaged.

The movie sure looks interesting. The director—who's done a lot of second unit work on a lot of good movies—has a slightly cock-eyed way of framing that takes it out of the "vaunted past" look of period films and makes it a bit more surreal. But, despite a terrific cast and some sparks of nice writing, the film doesn't rise above being a more expensive version of one of those "The Inventions That Made America" episodes (but without the teasing before commercials and re-running of footage you've already seen afterwards).

And with all its talk of greatness consisting of what you leave behind, there is more than a little pissing on a live-wire when it shows the blight of a skyline cross-hatched with electrical lines. But, then I don't think the Grid is what it's celebrating: the most moving sequence is when Edison shows off a new invention—a machine that shows hundreds of individual photographs of his late wife that appears to make her move and live again. You spend two hours talking electricity, but ultimately it's about the birth of motion pictures.

 

No wonder Scorsese put his name on it.