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Kino Review: Oppenheimer
Last week in the Friday Fun Thread, I posted my first reactions upon seeing the film, written literally from my car in the parking lot. My initial negative reaction was almost entirely because I sat down expecting to like the character of Oppenheimer. I went in mostly blind. The only thing I knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer was that he ran the Manhattan Project, said the meme words, and invented the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, so when he turned out to be a pretentious asshole from the first scene it colored my whole experience. I saw enough glowing reviews in the following week that I decided to see it again with fresh eyes, in IMAX this time, just in case that was the missing ingredient.
I liked it much more the second time. In fact, I think this is the best film I've seen since 1917 (2019). The nonlinear storytelling works well overall, but on first viewing some of the early sequences are confusing as it's not obvious when they occur chronologically. Not having to concentrate so much made it much easier to relax and let the music and cinematography wash over me.
I liked Nolan's treatment of science in Interstellar, and I like his treatment of science here. I'm the kind of guy who would have enjoyed a 30-minute sequence figuring out the fission cross-section of plutonium, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of technical details. Still, the film adequately captures the feel of science. There's an early scene where Niels Bohr asks Oppie, "Can you hear the music Robert?" It sounds like the kind of cliché 'math isn't everything' line you would expect in a dumbed down Hollywood film, but everyone who's ever studied quantum mechanics knew exactly what he meant. The disbelief when the first reports of uranium fission come in is perfect; everyone knows splitting the atom is impossible. Next they'll telling us they've synthesized a room-temperature superconductor.
My favorite character in the movie was Ernest Lawrence. I felt a spiritual connection with how he too is pissed off that everyone in Berkeley is a communist. What's he gonna do, leave academia and live amongst the proles? Roll your eyes at the leftist Jews running the show all you want, they're legitimately the smartest people around. At least he, as a native-born American, was able to see which way the wind was blowing and bail on the Oppenheimer hearing, unlike Teller, who naively told the truth and ended up blackballed.
The one creative mistake that stands out (other than having the setup for the Bhagavad Gita be a sex scene) is the use of practical explosion effects for the Trinity test. The buildup to the test is fantastic -- I was on the edge of my seat both times -- but the explosion itself is a bit anticlimactic. It's very clearly a gasoline fire in certain shots. There's just no way to use practical effects to replicate a white-hot ball of glowing plasma growing by radiation diffusion. Nolan almost makes up for this by delaying the arrival of the shock wave. The observers were miles away, and it took a long time for the sound to reach them. By the time it finally hits you've almost forgotten it was coming.
There are some minor thematic issues, particularly in the last act. It's not entirely clear how we are supposed to feel when Oppie loses his security clearance. I had the same reaction as Richard Hanania to the plain text of what is on screen, but the subtext as conveyed by the score and cinematography is that his wife is a hero for pretending to not remember if she ever got an official Communist Party USA membership card. I do think we needed an extended sequence after the bomb test to wrap up the Strauss storyline, but they definitely could have cut 10-15 minutes out of it.
Overall 9/10. Surprisingly worth seeing in IMAX, despite most of the scenes consisting of guys talking in rooms.
How the fuck u make a movie about the invention of the atomic bomb and it has the most underwhelming depiction of an atomic explosion ever committed to film.
Nolan has zero confidence in his own dialogue and the performances of his actors, and uses music as a crutch. In a typical drama film, understated music is used sparingly to accentuate the emotions and actions onscreen. Most of the actors who appear in Oppenheimer express few if any emotions (even though all of them have shown an ability to do so in other, better films), so Nolan instead relies on a relentless bullying score to emphasise everything. If everything is emphasised, nothing is. There's a scene where Opp and the military brass are debating which cities to bomb (and one dude veto Kyoto, probably one of two times this movie made me laugh), and it occurred to me that it was the first time in the movie that Nolan had allowed the onscreen action to speak for itself for more than thirty seconds. This relentless musical score in service of admittedly stylish cinematography, disaffected performances and cliché dialogue produces an effect not unlike watching a really expensive music video that goes on for three hours.
And yet in spite of this obvious lack of confidence in his writing abilities, the screenplay is peppered with lines that sound like they're intended to be witty or clever. Maybe one or two them produced the intended effect in a trailer. In a movie of this length, no one in the cinema so much as chuckled.
The scene where Opp is speaking and imagines the people in front of him bursting into flames was cool (and then they spoiled it by using the same effects again at the end of Opp's appeal, in a context in which it made no sense). The sequence with Casey Affleck was great. The build-up to the Trinity test was genuinely exciting and gripping, but then the test actually happens and it's the most colossal cinematic cocktease of the year.
I think Nolan is autistic. He doesn't seem to understand or like people at all, a fatal flaw when directing an R-rated drama for grownups about a real people. The early sequences where it's Opp's character drama and strained familial relations drag. None of the characters seem like people - they're robots reciting words. Florence Pugh breaks up with Opp and it sounds like she's a little ticked off at him for forgetting to collect her dry cleaning for her. The pace of the film notably picks up when they get to Los Alamos, when the movie can get down and dirty into Boys' Own detonators and isotopes, then declines again after the war is over. For the last hour of the movie I got the distinct impression that nobody else in the cinema really cared what happened to Opp or Strauss. The strenuous efforts to maintain cinematic intensity during the end of Opp's appeal seemed, frankly, laughable. The pyrotechnics, quick cuts and omnipresent score might work for a sci-fi thriller or action film - they definitely do not work for what by now has become a legal drama. Nolan is ostensibly making a movie for grownups, but can't resist his natural instinct to try to get the attention of the teenagers making out in the back seats. Spielberg, by contrast, always knows what mode he's operating in and never gets them muddled.
Not as bad as Interstellar. Probably marginally worse than Dunkirk, which at least had the self-awareness to recognise that Nolan is hopeless at a) writing believable or punchy dialogue and b) getting the audience to care about his characters; and hence generally didn't really try to do either. Miles and miles from the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as his only film really worth discussing.
I'm surprised to be saying this, but I'm Team Barbie 100% and it's not even close. Better screenplay, better performances, better production design, better cinematography, better makeup (seriously, that aged-up makeup in the appeal scenes, who do they think they're kidding?), at least some characters I can care about at least a little bit - and most importantly, it didn't outstay its welcome.
At least there was essentially no handheld camerawork. I was pleasantly surprised, given Nolan's reputation, to find the dialogue consistently intelligible, I think there were only one or two lines that slipped past me (and it wasn't because the music drowned them out).
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You paid to watch a three hour long movie twice?
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I wasn't bored, but as a movie it sucked: it's an artless piece of relentless exposition, a paint-by-numbers Wikipedia adaptation. Nolan doesn't understand the most important unit of cinematic language, the scene, and tries to hide it with garish sound design and 60s-era hallucinations.
It had at least three times too many characters as a movie can really handle. He should have started by cutting Oppenheimer's brother, who adds nothing substantial to the film. If there's no way to tell the story without them, Nolan should have just told a different story, one better suited to the strengths of motion pictures.
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I absolutely hated this movie. I don't know why people just go along with Nolan's awful sound mixing. There were many moments when I could not even hear the dialogue because Nolan insists of having that THOWWWOMMM sound playing over everything. You could definitely notice it in his previous films, but it feels like it's gotten a lot worse this time.
It's also very plain that even 3 hours isn't enough time for all the history Nolan wants to cover. He has no time to be subtle with his character's motivations, which is why towards the end you have RDJ going on an expository rant about why his character hates Oppenheimer, which sounds like he's rattling off the Wikipedia page on Lewis Strauss.
I also don't think this film was particularly coy about where its sympathies lie - you're supposed to sympathize with Oppenheimer and his entourage of remorseful nerds, and lament that the products of their work and research are not theirs to control. It's squarely in the "I believe SCIENCE" camp of liberalism that seems to believe scientists and the scientific establishment are just trying to be apolitical experts working for the betterment of mankind with no particular or personal biases of their own, and that they should be accorded authority over policy by virtue of their expertise, since it would be ugly to sully their position in society with something so uncouth as "politics", or democratic control over their work. Every government official in the movie is a bloodthirsty zealot, Edward Teller is a brute, and you have to feel sorry for Oppenheimer and how his lip trembles as he navigates these monsters.
I don't think Teller was being naive so much as he felt much more passionately about the cause of hydrogen bomb development than Oppenheimer did, because Teller's native Hungary was under Soviet occupation. John von Neumann felt the same way, and for similar reasons. There's an interesting discussion to be had about how Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues were Western Jews whose favorable opinions of communism came from academic hobnobbing and philosophical flirtation, and who were thus not keen on the idea of nuclear brinksmanship against the Soviets, versus other Jewish figures of the era like Teller, von Neumann and Ulam, whose native countries were under communist occupation. But the film doesn't have enough time to touch on that, and I doubt it would want to at any rate.
3/10; the next time I feel like watching a Nolan movie, I'll just have someone drive a pneumatic drill into my ears to simulate the experience.
I had a very different take on this. Oppenheimer from almost the first minute is shown as murderous, arrogant, a philanderer, and ethically questionable if not an outright monster that is more focused on his own accomplishments than the the implications of his project. I dont know how anyone could leave the movie thinking he was a good man. There were no good men or women in the entire movie.
I disagree. Groves, Lawrence, Bohr, and Oppenheimer's Brother (despite him and his wife being communists) all come out of story looking pretty good, and the last two exchanges we see between Oppenheimer and Einstein are excellently played and very much in line with the popular perception of him as the wise-old-sage of physics.
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One wonders how much of Oppenheimer's remorse was driven by the fact the bomb was used against Japan rather than Germany.
this was a meme on /tv/ (my bomb... was used on POCs?), but there's no reason that he would have been particularly aggrieved if it was used on the nazis.
>The son of German Jews, Oppenheimer would have preferred the bomb be ready earlier so that it could be used against the Nazis, but he still understood that his government would use it against Japan.
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You don't need to explain why anyone would hate or distrust Oppenheimer. He's portrayed as an offputting, sometimes dickish person. Really, the question is why anyone puts up with him.
You do have to justify why this guy would take offense and I think they do, at least on a character level (I can't speak to the history). Obviously there's political reasons (which is basically what Josh Hartnett's character is there to highlight in the first hour). But he's also clearly just a thin-skinned, Machiavellian narcissist and the movie is pretty clear on this.
They seed that pretty well. Oppenheimer makes an offhand (rude) comment about his lowly working class background and he flinches. He notably gets annoyed when Oppenheimer says he's "considering" his job offer. He keeps coming back to paranoid tales of people turning scientists against him or how they hate him for being the boss, he seems to have A Thing about the fact that he's a bureaucrat not a scientist. Every individual piece is justifiable because Oppy is an asshole, until it's taken together.
As someone with similar anxious tendencies - unfortunately without the Machiavellian talent - his reaction to the Oppenheimer-Einstein talk actually was uncomfortably legible. Especially the paranoid insanity of"people are reacting emotionally to something in this situation, is it cause they hate me?" . It's a pretty perfect example of that pathology.
You don't even need that final scene. It's basically redundant with Truman and his wife's harsh summations of Oppenheimer's behavior and character.
I found it harder to understand his character and decisions.
Maybe that was Nolan's intention but a biopic imposes more limits on shaping events to fit your narrative.
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Reminds me of one time a friend was visiting and we managed to recreate Hans Zimmer's Bladerunner 2049 by fooling around with a synthesizer and couple of effects units. Which really says a lot more about modern soundtracks and their reliance on distorted booms and horns than about anything else.
Zimmer's (and whoever he corralled into assisting him) work on BR2049 was presumably an attempt to mirror the Vangelis score of the first film which was entirely done on the synthesizers of the late 70s... and which remains an historic soundtrack. I encourage anyone interested in such things to look up the so-called Vesper edition. While you can use Garage Band in 2023 to mimic some of the same sounds, said sounds would not be available had Vangelis not been such a creative genius. He himself was very critical of so-called "New Age" music and I am not aware if he made any public comments on Zimmer.
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Those booms kill in IMAX though.
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That scene so clearly felt like Nolan having to fulfill a contractual obligation. "There you go nerds, he said the line. Don't spend the movie waiting for it".
I only saw it once but I also agree on the bomb. It may be the first time Nolan's much-memed-about VFX preferences has actually inhibited rather than enhanced my enjoyment.
Mhm. It's pretty amazing that, even though the entire framing outright tells you it's a witchhunt and you have Oppenheimer's POV, at a certain point you can actually begin to wonder about the guy...
I suppose we can say that it was perhaps the right decision but framed by pettiness and McCarthyism.
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I could have been better if it was cut by hour or so. Remove the framing stories, tell it linear like 10-15 minutes before Matt Damon's character enter the room and finish it with him exiting the Truman oval office.
Too much pretentious crap in the other parts. Classical Nolan.
I really liked the movie but I also feel like it would have been better if it were either 30 minutes shorter (cutting down on the number of repeated scenes) or a full hour longer and delivered as 5 45 minute episodes a la Chernobyl. Episode 1: Oppenheimer's time as a student abroad. Episode 2: Oppenheimer and the Berkley Marxist scene and initial meeting with Groves. Episodes 3 & 4: Oppenheimer's Time in Los Alamos culminating with the dropping of the Bomb. Episode 5: Senate hearing/epilogue.
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I was not planning on seeing it; this review has mostly changed my mind. Thanks!
I was particularly afraid that the movie would be a hagiography of the poor maligned Oppie, with an overlay of "trust the science" messaging. A fear amplified by reading some op-ed by Kai Bird (who has some second-degree connection to the movie I think?), about Oppenheimer, ending with a comparison to Fauci. (Would Fauci be flattered to know that he's being compared to "the nuke guy"? I wonder...). Gratifying to hear that it's a more normal movie.
On the other hand, I did not like Interstellar...
This is a good example of why bagging the whole film industry together is so lossy -- yes, there are directors who like to insert overt political messaging in their films, but Nolan (or James Cameron, Wes Anderson, etc.) do not.
As a kid I assumed that since it wasn't obvious the director of Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark were directed by the same person, then directors must not matter very much. As I get older I've begun to appreciate that this attitude was naive.
I beg to differ. I'm baffled as to how anyone can interpret The Dark Knight as anything other than an unapologetic defense of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Well, the most sympathetic/moral character in the movie (Lucius Fox) demands that the surveillance apparatus be dismantled. So my interpretation of this was literally the opposite of yours.
Given that The Dark Knight was released at the peak of Democrats pretending to be anti-war classical liberals and definitely not just opposed to whatever Bush wanted, I think my read more likely to be true.
But I do think that the fact this thread has multiple opinions about this movie and the director's intentions for multiple films is precisely why Nolan is great and why I'll watch everything he puts out, even if it all ranges from a bit of a mess (Tenet) to an absolute masterpiece (Inception)
He demands that it be dismantled - after successfully using it for its intended purpose. In other words, "desperate times call for desperate measures", which is exactly how the USA PATRIOT Act was justified at the time of its implementation.
I don't believe Nolan is great, and Inception sucks.
Puts up fists
Fight me, idgaf
Granted that I haven't seen it since it came out, but I remember it being better than Oppenheimer. Still not a movie I'd call "good" without reservation though.
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Makes sense. I was more concerned about the other influences (I didn't know how involved Kai Bird was for instance), but yeah I've seen Nolan films before and while I've never really liked them, they're at least not political.
Must've blown your mind to watch Schindler's List then :)
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I may be bringing my own personal baggage but I think the movie has a very cynical take on scientists, Oppenheimer, and the US government. Literally half the movie is about some deep state worm “manipulating procedural outcomes” to fuck over Oppenheimer due to a disagreement on policy/personality. If there is a villain, it’s the USG. My takeaway is that the rot we see today was fully functioning as early as the 60s. Likely well before that. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the “IFL SCIENCE” crowd and I think it explains a lot of the mid reviews.
Do you mean audience reviews? Among critics, Metacritic only lists 2 mixed reviews (out of 68) and no negative ones.
I mean the youtube critics I follow. RedLetterMedia, Critical Drinker, etc. I generally have contempt for anyone who gets listed as a critic on RottenTomatos. Audience reviews are a mixed bag but increasingly manipulated such that i dont put much weight on them. The YT shows are generally entertaining for me, however their take on Oppenheimer reveals that they have been so habituated to superhero movies that they are unable to really judge a movie that outside of a particular genre.
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