A video can't replace Tesla but... (Rating: 4.00)
Review : Tesla's life and history was greate and strange. Personally I felt that this video could be better. I don't understand Tesla native's lenguage and used english weren't very clear for a video intented for sale worldwide. Any way, every thing about Tesla is interesting.
Don't buy this DVD (Rating: 1.00)
Review : It's beyond doubt that Nikola Tesla was a genius. Equally it's beyond doubt that this entertaining movie is without question the most appalling transfer onto the DVD medium ever! It's not just the diabolical colour saturation or the abhorrent audio that should give this movie transfer 0 out of 1000 but on one scene the movie turns to B&W, pauses, rewinds (exactly like a VHS movie) before continuing again!!I wish it were possible to give this DVD a negative rating as its transfer is beyond a joke. Charging $USD26.96 makes this a horrendous criminal nightmare!
Absorbing film which captures much of Tesla's complexity (Rating: 5.00)
Review : I give this film five stars because it stays very focused on Tesla--the man, his ideas, and his interactions with important contemporaries of the time. The film has a brooding feel to it which captures the blend of genius, vision, eccentricity and mental instability that was Tesla. There are lots of night scenes which dramatically set off the electric "light-up" effects. I also liked the camera's frequent emphasis on Tesla's rapport with Nature--water, wind, lightning, the earth. The performances of the major characters (Tesla, Edison, Westinghouse, and Morgan) are all very enjoyable.
A good film about the first electrical engineer. (Rating: 5.00)
Review : I recommend this film about the man who was behind the first alternating current power system ( what we all have in our homes ), the induction motor, and other inventions. This is probably the only dramatization available about Nicola Tesla. I have seen one other, also a foreign movie, made somewhere in eastern europe, but not as good as this one. There was some talk about making a more expensive version of Telsa's life with Jeff Goldbloom staring, but so far nothing has come of it. Nicola Tesla wasn't all genius, he had some mental problems and entertained some ideas that seem absurd today.
A Bland Overview (Rating: 3.00)
Review : This overview of Tesla's life touches all the bases. The directing is lifeless. It often feels more like a stage play than a film, since much of the information is revealed through conversation rather than showing it happen. One flashback scene is in Serbian but if you've read a bio you know what happens. Tesla's dialogue is pretty good, a lot of the other dialogue is corny. Tesla is portrayed as depressed all the time--I think he had some humor in real life. The inaccurate conclusion of the film, that Tesla actually knew how to produce free energy but that J. P. Morgan wouldn't back him finacially in order to keep free energy from the world--is a little silly. The bulk of the film is about the contest between AC and DC, and I think they handled that pretty well considering the complexity of the topic. People who like special effects will be disappointed by the sparse pre-computer graphics optical effects.
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