BEFORE: Normally I wouldn't include a subtitle like "Director's Cut" in a title, but it seems to be a permanent fixture, that's the only cut that's running on cable, the director's cut, and it's labelled as such. Where's the regular cut? Ah, that question sent me digging for some back-story. This film was produced by the Weinstein Corp, and was set for release in 2017, after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. But then there were many sexual harassment claims made against Harvey Weinstein, and films got pulled from release due to the connected bad publicity, and the company went bankrupt and assets were sold off. The company that then acquired this film in 2018 set a release date for 2019, which enabled the director to add five more scenes, and also cut ten minutes from the running time. I'm not quiet sure how both of those things were accomplished, it seems like adding scenes would increase the running time, not shorten it - so now I'm a bit more intrigued.
The consensus seems to be that the re-cut vastly improved the film, but still, it only made $12 million worldwide, against a budget of $30 million. But still, maybe it made more than the company that acquired it paid for it, I'm not sure. Tom Holland carries over from "Dolittle", and let's hope the narrative here is at least as interesting as the story behind the delay and eventual release of the film.
THE PLOT: The story of the cutthroat race between electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to determine whose electrical system would power the modern world.
AFTER: Maybe it's just that TNT's been running "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Avengers: Endgame", and I keep them running in the background sometimes while I cook dinner or update my lists, but yesterday's film reminded me of "Spider-Man: Homecoming" because it had both Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland in it. (Yes, I know Tom Holland wasn't seen on camera, he only did the voice of the dog, but the younger actor who played Stubbins looked a LOT like him...) So "The Current War", naturally, reminds me of "Avengers: Endgame" because it's got both Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland in it, and there was some interplay between Doctor Strange and Spider-Man in that film (and allegedly there will be more, in the new Spider-Man film coming out this December). Man, it's been a long time since a new MCU movie came out, I really need "Black Widow" to be released AND be good. I've got "The New Mutants" on the DVR, but I'm saving it for October, and I'm not sure how good it is.
I was already familiar, somewhat, of the rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse, but it's good to have a refresher in cinematic form - Edison "invented" the light bulb (quotes in place because as this film notes, there was a whole team of people working on it, Edison was just the most persistent and got all the credit) but then came the question over how to get power to every city, every street, every home in America. Perhaps this problem at the time was a bit like, "How are we going to put men on the moon?" or "How are we going to get millions of Americans vaccinated?" You make a plan, and you get to work, and it's not going to be a perfect process, but you keep at it, this is the way.
Edison favored direct current, that's the type we're used to in batteries - it's safer, sure, but it was more expensive at the time, and it would have required a power plant or dynamo every mile or so. Alternating current (from what I remember from science class, it rapidly switches off and on, though Edison here likens it to a plumbing system where water's traveling in both directions through the same pipe, but I'm not sure that's true...) could be sent over a much larger distance, and was cheaper in the long run, but it's much more dangerous. Electrocution was promoted as a great risk to American citizens - the word for "death by electricity" hadn't been coined yet, but Edison suggested we call it "getting Westinghoused". Yeah, Edison was a bit of a bastard.
SCIENCE BREAK: Direct current, or DC, has been around since 1800, first produced by Alessandro Volta's battery, or "Voltaic pile". Science didn't understand at first how electricity flowed, presumably from positive to negative - but after building the first dynamo generator in 1832, Hippolyte Pixii found that by passing a magnet over the loops of wire, that caused the flow of electricity to reverse, thus creating alternating current. When electricity began being generated at power stations in the 1870's, it was used to power arc lighting, at very high voltage. Edison came along with his incandescent bulbs, and wanted much lower voltage in people's homes for safety reasons, but the use of transformers to raise or lower voltages allowed much longer transmission distances for alternating current, or AC (or "Marvel". JK.) So alternating current won out (SPOILER ALERT) and cities that had been set up for DC had to change their systems over the next few decades - high-voltage DC transmission is possible now, like via undersea cables, but it wasn't an option back then, and this is why we've got electric lines out in the open and hanging from street poles, and not buried underground like cable TV lines. Umm, I think. (Now for God's sakes, how the hell does a phonograph record work?)
Funny coincidence, on this day in history, May 16, 1888, Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture describing his plans for the equipment that would allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over great distances. Three years later, on May 16, 1891, the International Electrotechnical Exhibition opened in Frankfurt, Germany, and showcased the first transmission of high-power, three-phase electric current. Let's hear it for grounding wires!
Now, back to Edison, that bastard. According to this, he blew off a dinner meeting with George Westinghouse on his way back from showing his phonograph to President Arthur, and thus a wedge was driven between them. Plus, you know, that whole AC/DC thing. Edison supposedly resisted inventing weapons, he didn't want any of his products to be responsible for loss of life, but that applied only to humans - he wasn't above electrocuting animals to demonstrate how dangerous a bit of the old alternating current was. Here it's a horse, but I remember reading how he killed an elephant with electricity just to make a point. But this got people thinking that there might be a more humane way of killing convicted murderers, so Edison secretly invented the electric chair, provided that everyone knew that the Westinghouse current was being used to "humanely" kill the people on death row. (I know, there's an obvious contradiction there, but some people are apparently OK with it.)
Westinghouse tracked down Edison's correspondence with the prison warden in Buffalo, and Edison took a very public hit as the inventor of a death machine. Perhaps this all goes to explain why he lost the Current War, and the promoters of Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893 chose to light the event with AC, not DC, and then once Westinghouse was able to tap into hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls, the war was over. Edison lost, but he wasn't down for long, rumor has it he went on to invent motion pictures, so really, in the end, he and everybody else won. What would America be in the world without the power of Hollywood?
The secret weapon in the war was probably Nikola Tesla, who worked for Edison at the start of the Current War, but he didn't get the recognition or the money he was promised for his contributions, so he switched sides and partnered up with Westinghouse. There's a whole other film called "Tesla" that I have on the same DVD as this one, but I haven't been able to link to it yet - maybe I can fit it in somewhere in the second half of the year. The closing credits give us an update on what happened to all three men - Edison invented movies and got lots of credit, Westinghouse was rewarded for his years of service with a medal that was ironically named for his rival, and Tesla died in the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan while deep in debt. (Very ironically, the New Yorker was powered by DC current at the time, and was until the 1960's.)
Whatever else Edison did in his life, he was pretty good at landing on his feet, mostly by just inventing the next big thing. He could have used some help with marketing, because naming everything after himself just didn't work - Edison Electric got folded into General Electric, and Edison's phonograph became just the phonograph. I get it, everybody remembers who invented the Phillips head screwdriver, but nobody remembers the guy who invented the regular one. But if you're only as good as your reputation, then one wrong move and nobody wants to name anything after you when you're gone. We still have "Con Ed", Consolidated Edison, here in NYC though, so everybody in Manhattan gets to curse Thomas Alva's name once a month when the utilities bill is due.
What's weird to me is that after Westinghouse and Tesla had such great success with getting electric power from the hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls, why didn't they follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion? The theory was that this river's going to flow by here every day, nothing's going to stop that, so why not harness its power and use that to generate electricity, and they were on the right track, for sure. But in addition, enough solar energy hits Earth every day to supply all the power we need and then some, why are we still letting most of that go to waste?
An update on that whole elephant thing - the elephant's name was Topsy, and was executed at Luna Park at Coney Island in 1903, years after AC beat out DC. So Edison never electrocuted an elephant to prove the dangers of AC, at that time Edison the man was out of the power business, however a crew from the Edison film company was there to capture the event in a movie, called "Electrocuting an Elephant", The film was credited to Thomas Edison, though he was not there in person. The newspapers at the time pointed out that the killing was carried out by "electricians of the Edison Company", again confusing the company with the man. Then things were confused even further in 2008 when WIRED magazine ran an article about the incident, called "Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point". Way to be 100 years late with the wrong facts, WIRED magazine... Topsy was a "bad" elephant who had killed a spectator, and so had to be put down, and so she was poisoned, strangled and electrocuted, all at the same time. However, the Current War had been over for ten years, so it proved no point in that regard.
Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Knives Out"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "A Single Man"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Simon Manyonda, Stanley Townsend (last seen in "The Voices"), Tuppence Middleton (last seen in "MI-5"), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2007)), Conor MacNeill, Damien Molony, John Schwab (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Louis Ashbourne Serkis (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Evy Frearson, Corey Johnson (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Oliver Powell, Sophia Ally, Woody Norman, Nigel Whitmey (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Celyn Jones, Tom Bell, Giles Terera, Nancy Crane, Tim Steed, Joseph Balderrama (also carrying over from "Dolittle"), Harry Melling (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Craig Roberts (last seen in "Tolkien"), Tom Fisher (last seen in "The King"), Craig Conway, Simon Kunz, Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Elstree 1976"), Ben Mars, Colin Stinton (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Simon Lowe, Philip Philmar.
RATING: 6 out of 10 patent applications
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