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Tesla Movie Review

Tesla is a 2020 biopic directed by Michael Almereyda and starring Ethan Hawke in the titular role. It’s an off-puttingly strange, slim movie.

Going in, I had very small expectations regarding the quality of this movie, and my hunch ultimately proved to be right – it’s a giant mediocrity. First and foremost, let’s comment upon the casting, which is absolutely terrible. It’s so atrocious in fact that I continued being baffled at these choices.

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The supporting cast is a bit better, though I personally could not picture Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Thomas Edison. He’s good, but he would not be my first choice to play Edison, not even close. The others are all rather forgettable with all of the women being particularly uninteresting.

But the biggest offender naturally has to be Ethan Hawke. Hollywood has always been hypocritical. They always preach about diversity, yet they only care about racial diversity and never the national one. Clearly, a Slavic actor should have played Tesla, but they hopelessly did not choose that route, quite unlike the last season of Doctor Who. In the Tesla episode there, Goran Visnjic played him, and he was fantastic. The overall storyline there was worth him, but here even the plot is quite bad, but more on that later.

I love Hawke, don’t get me wrong. And he is almost always great. However, here this was obviously a great example of how misguided vanity projects can be. Not only was he cast badly, but his performance is also one of the worst that I’ve seen from him ever. It’s rare that he puts out such a weak performance, but apart from physically being somewhat similar, he is so unlike Tesla on all grounds and he was quite unimpressive and forgettable in the role that he hurt the entire movie.

But Tesla is also scripted rather badly. I somewhat liked the first half, which is where the movie was at least somewhat engaging, factually interesting and even intriguing. Some of the scenes between Edison and Tesla are also good. Unfortunately though, the filmmakers chose to include very strange choices later down the line, and they made the film too odd for me.

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Ultimately, I liked the first half more. This is where the movie was at its most conventional and straightforward with narration and all. It was still much better than the second half. This is where the film went off the rails by introducing overly unrealistic, stupid plot points and scenario as as well as that ridiculous singing ending that to me was just ludicrous and totally dumb. Michael Almereyda clearly wanted to make a strange movie so hard that his desperate efforts showed throughout. The movie looks good for sure due to good cinematography and some effective imagery, but the pacing is weak and the dialogue is also questionable.

Hollywood continues to be hypocritical when it comes to their much sought after diversity. They are all about racial diversity, but the diversity of nationalities continues to be non-existent. Case in point, Tesla. Unlike Doctor Who, here they made a terrible choice not only by excluding a Slavic actor from portraying this Serbian scientist, but by making a horrible casting choice with Ethan Hawke who is so unlike him that it took me out of the movie completely. It’s by far his weakest performance so far. Others fare much better and the movie’s first half is fine as is the cinematography, but the misguided second half went off the rails with the desperate attempts to be weird and different with the worst offender being that ludicrous musical ending.

My Rating – 2