The Current War is a fairly low wattage affair

The Current War has spent so much time wandering in the cinematic wilderness that I really wanted to like it more than I did. Unfortunately the story of the film’s time in movie purdah may be the most interesting thing about it.

The film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival two years ago and was all set for release in October 2017. However as a Harvey Weinstein production it got caught up in his legal troubles and the demise of his company. In the end all trace of Weinstein has been removed from the credits, the film has been sold to new distributors and goes on release in the UK this month and the United States in October – just two years late.

In a perfect world The Current War would be the little movie that could; triumphing over adversity and sweeping all before it at the Oscars. Sadly this is an imperfect world and its chances are slim.

Like most films showcased at Toronto this was originally seen as an Academy Awards contender. It ticks a lot of Oscar bait boxes; serious subject, period drama, big cast in mutton chop whiskers, lavish production values, and educational too. In the end though this is a pretty workmanlike affair which fundamentally lacks drama and tries to cover too much ground.

Set in the latter part of the 19^th century it’s the story of the battle between two men, Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Joseph Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), to bring electricity to America. It should be about the dawn of the modern age, instead it is an argument about the merits of Edison’s Direct Current system versus the Alternative Current system proposed by Westinghouse. Nikola Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, also pops up but gets fairly short shrift.

One big flaw is that we are given no one to root for; Westinghouse was marginally the more decent of the two but it’s a close run thing. There is no real insight into these historical ciphers. The film becomes a debate about respective philosophies and since we are never told the fundamental difference between the two systems – there’s some flimsy guff about hosepipes – we can’t really form an opinion. It’s an argument that unfolds in front of us but in which, apart from those who are electricians or physicists, we have no agency.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon compensates for the basic lack of drama with a very fussy aesthetic. There are so many overhead ‘God shots’ that there should be a warning for vertigo sufferers. The camera operator also appears to be on a bungee cable as shots disappear out of the top of the frame or pan dizzyingly left or right. This endless movement took me right out of the picture. There is a difference between creating rhythm and letting the story settle.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon anchor the film with solid, if unspectacular performances. One advantage of the delay is that Tom Holland is now a star but he’s not given a lot to do until it’s too late and Spider-Man fans will be disappointed. Overall the effect is very stagey – this is playwright turned screenwriter Michael Mitnick’s first screenplay – and no amount of dizzy camera tricks can change that.

Given the story this film should have been better than it is but the reality is we don’t know whose story it is or why we should care. There are so many heavy-handed allusions to the development of moving pictures that the overall message seems to be that we wouldn’t be watching anything at all if it wasn’t for his contribution.

Overall The Current War is a low wattage affair in which sparks resolutely refuse to fly.

This Spider-Man is good but not great

When I started reading comic books, back in the early 1960s, single-issue stories were the norm. Everything, with very rare exceptions, was done in one. Mind you in those days you had 25 pages of story to play with in book-length stories, although most issues had a 17-page main story and an 8-page back-up.

One of Marvel’s great innovations was the introduction of the story arc. Suddenly the narrative could run for three or four issues, the result was a more novelistic approach to storytelling and the beginning of an upward curve in the age of the readership. That said, this was still an immense source of frustration for those in the UK given the randomness of distribution.

The upshot of this is an increasingly interdependent comic book landscape and the growth of the comic book universe. Which brings us to Spider-Man: Far from Home, a film which doesn’t really need to exist in its own right but is vital to the continued integrity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

I should point out, as Tom Holland did in the trailer, that if you haven’t seen Avengers Endgame (2019) this would be a good point to stop reading this blog.

The death of Tony Stark/Iron Man along with, to a lesser extent, the absence of Captain America, Thor, and The Black Widow, have caused ripples in the Marvel Universe. The main function of this latest Spider-Man film is to allow those ripples to spread and ultimately disperse. This is a world which has lost some of its greatest heroes and dealt with the loss and recovery of half of its population in the so-called ‘Blip’ so there are a lot of blanks to fill in.

Meanwhile there is another emergent Avengers-level threat as a series of giant elemental creatures powered by air, fire, earth and water appear all across Europe. These may be from another version of earth in a parallel dimension – yet more complexity – and they are being pursued by Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a hero from their world.

Inconveniently the only hero from our earth who appears to be handy is Spider-Man but he’s a bit mopey after the death of his mentor. Conveniently however he is on a school trip throughout Europe so the writers can bounce him from city to city as the creatures appear.

Mysterio is there to restore some of Spider-Man’s much-needed confidence and together they can combat the creatures in a story which seems to take Ian Fleming’s ‘thrilling cities’ approach to narrative.

It has to be said that Jake Gyllenhaal is just terrific; he is the ideal casting for a comic book movie. Ironically there was a time when he might have been Spider-Man but watching this film you get the sense he’d actually be a pretty good Superman.  He’s great and so prominent that Spidey ends up a bit like a guest star in his own movie; he’s not a character, more of a plot device.

Spider-Man has nothing to do except swing around on webs. There’s no wisecracking, there’s no exhilaration, there’s none of the stuff that made him such a fun character. This applies to a lot of the cast; Maria Hill for example is really underwritten, seen but not heard most of the time.

Actually the writing in the movie is very weak. It’s essentially a Young Adult romance with some super heroics thrown in. Compared to his work on Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) or Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Chris McKenna’s writing seems very flat here. It looks a bit like ticking boxes rather than telling an interesting story. How convenient, for example, that everyone in Spider-Man’s life – and therefore in this film – were among those who were blipped. How much more interesting would it have been if Peter Parker or MJ or any of the other principal characters had no disappeared? This and many other things go unaddressed.

Spider-Man: Far from Home does all that you would expect but for me it was just a little flat; good but not great. However it does offer the promise of better days to come with a mid-credits sequence that might be one of the most significant events in the MCU and I’m really excited for that.