イーサン・ホークが孤高の発明家、ニコラ・テスラを演じた伝記映画。舞台は1884年。移民としてニューヨークへやってきたテスラは、憧れのエジソンのもとで働き始めるのだが……。天才であるがゆえに孤独な人生を歩んだ、テスラの半生を描く。
製作費: $5,000,000 (8億円)
興行収入: $459,051 (1億円)
推定収支: $-4,540,949 (-7億円)
※製作費・興行収入はTMDBのデータを参照しています。収支は(興行収入 - 製作費)で算出したFindKey独自の推定値であり、広告宣伝費や諸経費は含まれません (1ドル=150円換算)。
According to this movie, Thomas Edison (MacLachlan) and Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) were like Mozart and Salieri if Mozart and Salieri had been anything like they are portrayed in Amadeus – but then Tesla has as tenuous a hold on reality as Amadeus does, sans all the things that make Milos Forman's film otherwise great. This movie derives a sick pleasure from comparing the two inventors, emphasizing Edison's failures over Tesla's successes – whatever those may have been; I confess that, after seeing the film, I haven't the slightest idea of Tesla's achievements, apart from alternating current (which he did not invent) and, apparently, communicating with Mars. Perhaps it's due to the latter that Hawke plays Tesla as some kind of alien; a combination of Keanu in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tesla depicts two meetings between the inventors only to admit that neither actually happened. In one of those imaginary encounters, Edison apologizes to Tesla and tells him that he was wrong about him. What is the point of this? If it is supposed to be a retroactive 'f-you' to Edison, methinks he is long past the point of caring. Apart from the historically revisionist chip on its shoulder, Tesla is a stylistic disaster. The film is narrated by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), American financier and banker J.P. Morgan's (Donnie Keshawarz) daughter. In addition to her role in the events of the film, Anne appears in cutaways, sitting at a table with a Mac computer (?), reporting the respective number of results in a Google search for Tesla and Edison, and telling us to Google the American businessman and engineer George Westinghouse. If this weren't strange enough, in the second half of the movie director/screenwriter Michael Almereyda has Hawke stand against a background that is either a matte painting (Niagara Falls, a field in Colorado, a restaurant) or a projection (a pair of horses frolicking in a meadow, to whom Hawke offers an apple); this might work in a stage play, or if the entire film consistently followed the same aesthetic, but here it's just another incomprehensible artistic choice. All of the above, however, is nothing compared to what will go down in history as arguably the lowest point in cinema in the year 2020; Ethan Hawke as Nikola Tesla doing a karaoke version of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." This is the exact moment, with about ten minutes to go, when I said "F this movie" and never looked back.
