Don't let the fancy attire and the Gilded Age setting fool you, there is nasty business afoot in "The Current War."

It's a power struggle, both literal and societal, with Benedict Cumberbatch as inventor Thomas Edison on one side, Michael Shannon as industrialist George Westinghouse on the other, Nicholas Hoult as eccentric visionary Nikola Tesla in the middle and the future of electricity in America hanging in the balance.

In theaters Friday, Oct. 25, the film is a tale of innovation advanced via moral compromise. There are dead animals, corporate espionage, even the invention of the electric chair all deployed in the battle to determine whether Edison's direct current or Westinghouse's alternating current would light up the nation.

It's a story rife with tragedy and squandered potential.

"What could have been if (Edison) and Westinghouse and Tesla had all combined forces?" asked Cumberbatch. "It would have been a different world.”

“We create the war," added Shannon. "It’s not inevitable. It’s our creation and it’s not necessary. And it’s not even that valuable, at the end of the day.

"I mean, some people would argue that it’s pushing the ball down the field or whatever, but like Benedict was saying you can make a lot more progress by cooperating and being unified. But human beings have a remarkable propensity to make everything extraordinarily more difficult than it needs to be. It seems to be our calling card.”

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There's a moral to be learned from the Edison vs. Westinghouse battle, Cumberbatch noted.

“I’ll probably just be demolished on Twitter for saying it, but the tech giants of now, instead of combating, imagine what the combined resources of all of them would be if they tackled a single issue, head-on through their combined resources," he said. "I mean, that could be really game-changing.”

"The Current War" initially played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017. It's arriving in theaters this fall in its director's cut format, which includes five new scenes but at an hour and 47 minutes is still 10 minutes shorter than the previous version. The film also boasts new visual effects and a new score.

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Director Alfonso Gomez‐Rejon, a two-time Emmy nominee who had previously helmed 2015's "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," brings the 1880 to 1893 saga to life with a bracingly modern sensibility and lightning bolt energy.

“This was a movie about the future, it’s not about the past," said Gomez-Rejon. "It was a time that itself was rich with new ideas, innovations, and these were the great disruptors, right? So why make a film that’s a stodgy, static, old fashioned period piece when I want to give a sense of what that time might have felt like? It is a contemporary movie. It’s a very relevant movie today.”

It's also a distinctly New Jersey movie, with much of the action taking place at Edison's Menlo Park facility in what is now the township of Edison, Middlesex County.

What drew the Ohio-born, Michigan-raised Edison to the Garden State?

Cumberbatch has a practical explanation: “Cheap rent.”

The London-born, Oscar-nominated actor elaborated on the possible economic motivations for Edison setting up shop in Jersey.

“I think that great innovation, artistry, all happens in places where you can afford space to build,” said Cumberbatch. “That research and development laboratory that was Menlo Park, I think that was part of it. Manhattan was a crowded place. There was just no room for it."

It's a pattern seen time and again in arts and industry, Cumberbatch said.

"It’s an amateur guess so please don’t take that the wrong way, but I do think you have those pockets of London and New York, the New York area, which suddenly become a hotbed for a certain activity and then it moves on because that place gets too expensive. People can’t afford the rent and they go somewhere else,” he said.

There’s also the factor of New York City’s function as, in Cumberbatch’s words, “the gateway to the modern world.”

Born in what is now Croatia, Tesla worked for future rival Edison in Paris, then in New Jersey. Likewise, industrial magnate Samuel Insull, played as a young man in the film by Tom Holland, left London to work in what Gomez‐Rejon described as Edison’s “dream factory.”

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This area, Gomez-Rejon explained, was “a home for immigrants and new ideas. Whether it’s New York and New Jersey, there was a constant flow there. And Edison was so famous already, maybe it attracted great minds.”

The innovation didn’t stop with Edison and Tesla. Italian wireless technology pioneer Guglielmo Marconi worked in Wall and New Brunswick in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Bell Labs, which opened in Holmdel in 1962, was the home of cutting-edge technological thought and development for decades.

“New Jersey,” said Gomez-Rejon, “breeds great minds.”

"The Current War," 107 minutes, rated PG-13, in theaters Friday, Oct. 25.

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