‘Tower to the People’ a slog through Nikolai Tesla’s dream

Serbian American inventor Nikolai Tesla’s reformed status as a forward-thinking geek god has been remarkable. His name’s on a cool electric car. But what everyone should know him as is the father of what powers everybody’s home: alternating current. It’s his grand, unfinished and misunderstood early 20th century experiment in building a world-changing wireless technology lab and power source in Long Island, however, that is the focus of a documentary with a mouthful of a title, “Tower to the People: Tesla’s Dream at Wardenclyffe Continues.”

In an overstuffed, repetitive and clunky approach that plays more like a PowerPoint presentation than a film, director Joseph Sikorski runs through the story of Tesla’s haphazard, funding-challenged endeavor to build a tower that would send free energy across the world. The science, though, rather than exciting, makes the eyes glaze over. Then he choppily segues to a long, tedious segment about the crowd-funding campaign to buy the Wardenclyffe site, where famed architect Stanford White’s building still stands, and turn it into a museum.

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Sikorski chronicles his own unmade Tesla biopic too, without mentioning that he’s this film’s director (until the end credits). “Tower to the People” means well, and Tesla deserves his own movie, but it’s like being cornered by a zealot: an educational slog that morphs into an infomercial.

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“Tower to the People: Tesla’s Dream at Wardenclyffe Continues.”

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

Playing: At the Crest, Westwood.

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