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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2567 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 21, 2023

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Oppenheimer Review: 30 minutes of Oppenheimer being a piece of shit, followed by 2 hours of Manhattan Project stuff, followed by 30 minutes of acting like the guy trying to tell Congress that Oppenheimer is a piece of shit is actually the bad guy, as if the first 30 minutes didn’t happen.

The film opens with Oppenheimer’s attempted murder of his lab professor. We are then treated to Oppenheimer attending Communist Party meetings, graphic sex scenes with communists Oppenheimer meets at Communist Party meetings, and Oppenheimer cheating on his wife (a communist) with another communist. The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance, but thematically the film is all over the place. Are we supposed to feel bad when he gets his security clearance revoked? Not even Nolan’s editing can make us forget about the massive security holes that lead to Stalin getting the bomb in 1949.

The relationship between Edward Teller and Oppenheimer was a high point for me. Oppenheimer’s wife is livid that he shakes Teller’s hand after giving slightly negative testimony, as if professional differences can’t be overcome by working together on the most important project on world history.

Before I even consider seeing it: is Leslie Groves a major character? Like, 25+ mins of screen time?

Yeah, I'd say 25 minutes of screen time is about right

Excellent, that's that's the about the amount of time he should be in an Oppenheimer focused Manhattan project movie.

The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance

I wanted so much more of that. I honestly couldn't give less of a shit about Oppenheimer's communist orientation, I wanted an actual history of the manhattan project, and I wanted all my childhood physics heroes to actually be portrayed in the film, but all I got was some guy putting marbles in a jar as a metaphor for the enrichment process. I went to see it with my mom who had no background physics knowledge, and she was left hopelessly confused about almost everything (which I guess is normal for a Nolan film). We left an hour before the end.

What do you mean graphic sex scenes? We don't see any full frontal nudity or really any butt. We see some tits a few times and that's it.

Thank you. I’ll still see it in IMAX for the cinematography. As a New Mexico youth, my retired Navy grandfather took me to the Nuclear Museum every year. Nukes show up from time to time in my dreams, most recently, last week.

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