(News)
– Before Tesla was the company, Tesla was the man. Nikola Tesla, to be exact, and a new movie – called Tesla—The pioneering scientist is generally praised for portraying Ethan Hawke. Watch the trailer. The total score on Rotten Tomatoes is 59%. Examples of what critics say:
- Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times: “Hawke distills, without exaggerating or distorting Tesla’s eccentricity, the strange, sometimes contradictory essence of character.” Chang refers to “Hawke’s Brilliant Internal Performance” and also credits writer-director Michael Almereyda for delivering a film that blames Tesla. (As the Rotten Tomatoes score suggests, this is not unanimous sentiment.)
- AO Scott, New York Times: He calls Hawke’s achievements “quiet magnetic,” adding that Hawke portrays Tesla “as a restless soul laden with genius and haunted by manliness.” An inferior movie might try to trace that back to Tesla’s childhood or something. But in this one, Tesla is “neither a heroic visionary nor a tragic hero. He’s a mood.”
- Amy Nicholson, Variation: “Hawke refuses to play Tesla in the way he is popularly imagined: an innocent dreamer,” she writes. “His Tesla is stoic and disenchanted, so incapable of humor that he can claim to hear ‘greet the planets’ and no one thinks it’s a joke.” As for the overall movie, “if there’s a big idea in ‘Tesla’, it’s hard to see.”
- G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle: The movie is not his cup of tea. It is “less a biopic than a mood piece, a recognition of how silent genius can not only be misunderstood, but is often on the verge of the powerful and egocentric,” he writes. “It’s intriguing, and I would not stop anyone from watching it, but for me … it’s not entirely about his mind.”
(Read more stories about movie versions.)
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