Ross W.V. Milburn

A valuable and inspiring movie that shows that the leading sportsmen and women are not just the lucky freaks of nature whose success could have been predicted by sports medicine. Instead, the great winners are individuals who started young and loved their sport, and created a personal style or technique that beat their opponents because it was innovative and unexpected. This movie reveals that inspired winners usually find their own unique path, and this message seems to apply to business success or other areas outside of sport.

This could have been a wonderful movie, but it wasn't for me. The concept of the story, the ruthless conflict between Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla, was promising, the period settings and acting were excellent, but the film was spoiled by misjudgements: (1) Most of the scenes were too dark (to hide inadequacy in the props? Or to emphasize the darkness of city night life before electric lighting?), (2) The dialogue was too fast, and jumped around from subject to subject, making the plot hard to follow, especially for foreigners (I'm English). Furthermore, the strange musical score also interfered with the spoken soundtrack, in a film where this was vital to follow the battles. (3) Too much time was spent on the electric chair dispute, and also on the several flashbacks to Westinghouse's memory of the Civil War, and here again, the dialogue was masked by abruptness and the loud musical score, making it difficult to see the point being made by this episode. (4) I suspect that the three main characters of the movie were fascinating people, but their nature's were represented as being so erratic and whimsical that it was not possible for me to identify or empathise with any of them.