Completed in 2017 and released only just now due to the break up of the Weinstein Company The Current War  is the story of Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse as they battled to set the standards for electric power and distribution in the United States and the wider world.

Benedict Cumber batch plays Thomas Edison, the proponent of Direct Current (DC) power. DC flows in a single direction and is simple, and at the time was the only current that could be used to drive motors and industrialization Industrialist George Westinghouse, played by Michael Shannon in a role where he not an over bearing villain, supports Alternating Current (AC), where the direction of election flow reverses many times per second. AC power could be produced much cheaper and with clever manipulation transmitted over vastly greater distances that DC which dissipates into nothing after barely more than a mile, but when Westinghouse is advocating for his system there were no motors that could run using the AC standard. Each man is presented favorably with neither placed into the role of ‘villain.’ Benedict’s Edison is a family man, devoted to his wife and children, and a person who refuse to use his genius, name, or vast intellectual resources to create engine of war and destruction; he consider the killing of humans abhorrent. Shannon’s Westinghouse is also a man devoted to his wife, treats her as partner in his enterprise, and also sees himself serving a public good. Edison is supported by his aide and confidant Samuel Insull (Tom Holland) while Westinghouse’s mirror support character is Franklin Pope (Stanley Townsend) the engineer that Westinghouse has charged with inventing an AC motor.

Into the violate conflict of towering intellects and ego arrives a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult.) Titles identified Edison as an ‘Inventor’ and Westinghouse as an ‘Industrialist’ but Tesla is labeled ‘Futurist,’ a word that would not be applied to technology until the 1920s. Tesla, always more concerned with what is possible than what is personally profitable, a visionary man with unprecedented gifts for engineering and technology claims to have solved the AC motor design.

The war to determine the electric standard is fought city by city, as some adopt Edison’s vision and other Westinghouse’s and the most vicious fighting take place on the front pages of the newspapers as propaganda replaces reason.

The film is generally well made, the scenes are tight, the performances stellar and yet the over all effect is only adequate.  Key moments in the historical record are omitted, such as Tesla surrendering his patents for the AC motor, ensuring that AC becomes the standard but costing himself an uncountable fortune, and set ups in the film are never paid off. The most frustrating of these is centered on the AC motor. Pope has a sewing machine connected to his AC motor and the needles does not move, Westinghouse implores that Pope must solves the problem and move the needle, but yet when the AC motor is invented there is no scene of the sewing machine in action. This is the sort of visual pay off moment that not only provided the audience with critical and visual understanding of the engineering but also can be used as an emotional beat for the characters. Not having such a moment dramatically undercuts the entire arc of the war.

Despite this The Current War  is worth seeing, it is competent film with an amazing cast.

Over the past two nights, my sweetie-wife and me watched the Finnish film The Unknown Soldier  a three-hour epic that follows the operations of a machine gun company from the start to the end to The Continuation War. That was, started in 1941 with Finland invading the Soviet Union in hope of regaining territory lost in 1939’s Winter War when the Soviets invaded Finland. Allied with Nazi Germany the Fins expected a collapse of the communist state and for a ‘greater Finland’ to emerge; history of course tells us that did not come to pass.

The film boasts a large cast of characters as we meet the machine gun company just as they have finished their training and the invasion of the USSR has commenced. Released in 2017 The Unknown Soldier  does not glorify warfare but presents it in a stark unforgiving manner in which death is sudden, violent, and often unexpected. While the characters are devoted to their nation, filled with pride and patriotism, the script never devolves into jingoism and hero worship and instead focuses on the day-to-day reality of warfare in a small unit. Early victories buoy the characters’ moods but do not last as the invasion at first falters, stagnates, and eventually collapses into retreat and route. On the directorial front I particularly liked that Aku Louhimies maintained a line of direction for the invasion itself with motion from left to right indicating Eastward and into the Soviet Union and right to left indicating westward and retreat; fast shots of the company marching quickly established the current state of the war. The filmmakers avoided easy clichés for the characters and kept them complex with something difficult and contradictory motivations; they never ceased to be people  first and soldiers second.

The Unknown Soldier is currently available for rent as a streamed film on Amazon.