Tesla: Master of Lightning (2000)

Excellent but underrated film

Boring

Absolutely the worst movie.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Tesla was an immigrant from Yugoslavia, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical apparatus. It's difficult to summarize his life because, well, it had so many ups and downs, some of them reaching clinical levels. He may have been a genius but he was no businessman, in an era of cut-throat businessmen, and he became something of a fantasist in his later years.I have a limited background in electronics but some of this material was presented a little to fast for me to grasp. What's the good of telling us that Tesla invented the generator when you don't know what a generator is. (It's a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, if I remember.) He filed a number of patents, important in the development of alternating current -- the kind that turns your light and this computer on -- and in radio, but the credit and the income were largely ripped off by more cunning types like Westinghouse, Edison, and Marconi.Tesla was pretty neurotic, when you come right down to it. He couldn't touch hair, for instance, and couldn't manage to hook up with any beauties of the period despite his celebrity and wealth. He wasn't a mathematical wizard but, like Einstein, he came to waste a lot of time on scientific canards -- Einstein on the unified field theory, Tesla on a means of transporting electrical energy without wires. It would have been nice if Tesla succeeded. We can all do without electrical cables, utility poles, and those giant towers of electrical power that mar our landscapes and interfere with flying kites. However, with the best will in the world, we cannot light a bulb in London with a beam of electrical power originating in New York.The film brings up the so-called Star Wars Initiative and the atomic bomb and some other modern wonders but is finally forced to admit that they owe little to Tesla. What we do owe to Tesla, at least in part, is Times Square and Osaka, where the lights never dim and it's always as bright as day. In fact, almost everything that runs on electricity owes something to Tesla. Even the electric chair, but not flashlights.In his old age, Tesla received a stipend from Westinghouse that enabled him to live in modest comfort in the Hotel New Yorker. He spent most of his time in the park, feeding pigeons, and died at 87. It was a tumultuous and productive life. Whether or not Tesla found it satisfying, no one can say for sure, including this documentary.

There is a small but hard-core group of people out there that think that Nicola Tesla was the smartest man that ever lived. While I will gladly admit that he was one of the smarter men of our time, one fact these die-hards seem to struggle with is his sanity. They are dogmatic and will not acknowledge that Tesla was mentally ill--which he VERY clearly was. There...I had to get that off my chest.The film does a nice job encapsulating the life of Tesla. Mostly it focuses on his brilliance in regard to electricity but it also hits a bit on his bizarreness--his weird theories, his phobias and his lack of social skills (perhaps he had what today might be seen as Asperger's). Because it gives this total picture, I would strongly recommend the film. It's well constructed, interesting and well worth your time--and does a nice job of discussing the genius of Tesla...and his wackiness.

I have seen nearly all the documentaries around on Sir Nikola Tesla but I'll have to admit that none of the others stand even close to how good this was. The best part was that this documentary didn't just showed the bright side of Sir Nikola life but also the points where he was not good, such as the social behavior etc.It didn't just showed the inventions of Nikola Tesla but also the future advancements in the patents that Nikola Tesla registered.So basically this should be a one stop knowledge base for the whole Nikola Tesla achievements, failures, miseries and fame.Hats off to the makers!!Good Day